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STORIES OF IMAGINATION

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE
-a novelet by Clifford Simak

In March

Don't look up . . beware . . you may
be trapped by the

BABYLON
IN THE SKY

Eiilcr a world where eilies sail high in ihe sky lilled with evil ;ind de-
slruetion. Follow the Earth people as they are redueed to the state of
helpless slaves. .And w hat of the fate of the good ones, the deeent ones'.’
Find out about ;i:l the horrors ;ind destinies in a story th;tt marks the
most reeent appearanee of sei-fi writer. Edmond Hamilton.

BABY10MINTHE8KY

CHOCKY-

AND: John Wyndham. famed tiuthor (The Day of the Triflids and
the Midw ieh Cuekoos ) presents a strange ;ind intriguing novelet. It's
iibout a little boy w ho seems to do and say normal things. But who is
the strtmge invader of his mind'.’ You'll be sttirtled by the truth about
Cliockw

March Amazing is an exciting issue that shouldn't be missed!

Now on sale. Only 35/

FANTASTIC, Stories oF Imagination, Vol. 12, No. 3, March, 1963, is published monthly by
Ziff-Davis Publishing Compony, at 434 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago 5, Illinois. Subscrip-
tion rates: One year United States and possessions $3.50; Canada and Pan American Union
Countries $4.00; all other foreign countries $4.50. Second Class postage paid at Chicago,
Illinois and at additional mailing offices.

THER£ are some things that cannot
be generally told — things you ought to
know. Great truths are dangerous to
some — but factors for personal power
and accomplishment in the hands of
those who understand them. Behind
the tales of the miracles and mysteries
of the ancients, lie centuries of their
secret probing into nature’s laws —
their amazing discoveries of the hid-
den processes of man’s mind, and the
mastery of life's problems. Once shroud-
ed in mystery to avoid their destruc-
tion by mass fear and ignorance, these
facts remain a useful heritage for the
thousands of men and women who pri-
vately use them in their homes today.

THIS FREE BOOK

The Rosicrucians (not a religious

organization) an age-old brotherhood
of learning, have preserved this secret
wisdom in their archives for centu-
ries. They now invite you to share the
practical helpfulness of their teaching
Write today for a free copy of ue
book, "The Mastery of Life.’* Within
its pages may lie a new life of oppor-
tunity for you. Address; Scribe NXV,

SEND THIS COUPON T

I Scribe NiV. j

j The ROSICRUCIANS (AMORO |

I Sao Joie, California i

{ Please send me the /rrr book, TSrAldfrrrji ■
, e/Is/it, which explains how I may learn to j
I use my faculties and powers of mind. i

I I

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City_

(AMORO SAX JOSE* CALIFORNIA. U.SaA.

FANTASTIC

STORIES OF lAAAGINATlON

MARCH 1963

Veluma 12 Numbar 3

R£G. U. S. PAT. Off

ZIFF-DAVIS PUBLISHING COMP ANT

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(1946>1953>

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rector

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President

Stanley B. Greenfield. Tice President

Editorial Diroctor
NORMAN M. LOBSENZ

\OVELETS

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

By Clifford D. Simak 6

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

By 1. G. Ballard 46

NINE STARSHIPS V/AITING

By Roger Zelazny 96

SHORT STORIES

LONG-IOST FANTASY CLASSICS:

AN APPARITION

By Guy de Maupassant 78

THE WET DUNGEON STRAW

By lean Richepin 85

HIS NATAL STAR

By Austyn Granville 88

Edilor

CEIE GOLDSMITH

Zlfl-Oavla Publishing Compan,
Editorial and Eaeoutlve Olllew
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New York IS. New York
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Advertising Manager.

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FEATURES

EDITORIAL 5

COMING NEXT MONTH 77

ACCORDING TO YOU 126

Cover: Jack Goughon
Illustrating Physician to the Universe

6UBBCBIPT10N SEBTICE: All BubscrlptloD coire*
spondence should be addressed to FANTASTIC, Clr«
culatloo Department, 434 South Wabash Avenue, Ghl«
cago. Illinois. Please allow at least aU weeb for
change of address. Include your old address, as well as
new— enclosing If possible SQ address label from •
recent issue.

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EDITORIAL CONTB3UTIONB must be accompanied
by return postage and will be bandied with reasonable
care: however publisher assumes no responsibility for
return or safety of art work, photographs or manuacrlpte.

T he remorseless march of science really came
home to roost in our editorial sanctum re-
cently. You will note in this issue an excellent
novelet by J. G. Ballard, titled A Question of Re-
Entry. (see p. 46). It concerns the search for a
moonship pilot believed to have crashed, upon
his return from Luna, in the Amazonian jun-
gles. It is explained that the pilot was unable
to radio his exact location at the time his ship
plunged down out of control, because the atmos-
phere was ionized by the heat of his re-entry,
and the electrically-charged field blacked out
his radio signals.

Well, at the time we bought and scheduled
that story, and set it in type and closed the page
forms, radio-blackout-due-to-ionization was a EDITORIAL
reality phenomenon. Enter, however, the re- ■

morseless march of science. Couple of weeks
ago came the news from communications engineers working on ex-
perimental Air Force vehicles, that the ionization blackout problems
has been solved. Equipment has been developed that will enable radio
signals to penetrate the ionization field 99 per cent of time.

The breakthrough — literal as well as figurative — was made possible
by the use of higher frequencies. New equipment will broadcast at
frequencies of thousands of megacycles, far above those now practic-
able to use for high-performance voice and data transmissions. Pre-
viously these frequencies had been suitable only for “crude" trans-
missions — such as diathermy and the annealing of metals.

Ballard’s theme had a real-life genesis when, on his three-orbit
Mercury capsule flight last May, Scott Carpenter was cut off from
radio communication with Cape Canaveral for four minutes during
his re-entry. The new equipment will benefit not only astronauts; It
will be even more important in the light of such projects as the ex-
perimental manned orbital gliders (originally named Dyna-Soar).
Since the gliders are winged, the pilot’s descent through the area
where ionization would occur will be far longer ; the blackout “sheath”
could persist for 20 minutes or more — obviously too long to be out of
touch with a ground control station. If you can overlook this bit of
now-suddenly-anachronistic science in Ballard’s story, we think you’ll
find the rest of it fascinating. Shows you what science-fiction writers
(and editors!) have to contend with, nowadays. — N.L.

PHYSICIAN to the

UNIVERSE

The statutes were quite clear: illness was a criminal
offense, and the offender cast into Limbo. None came
back from Limbo. But Alden Street was bound to try,
although for a long time he did not know the reason.

H B awoke and was in a place
he had never seen before. It
was an unsubstantial place that
flickered on and off and it was a
place of dusk in which darker
figures stood out faintly. There
were two white faces that flick-
ered with the place and there was
a smell he had never known be-
fore — a dank, dark smell, like the
smell of black, deep water that
had stood too long without a cur-
rent to stir it.

And then the place was gone
and he was back again in that
other place that was filled with
brilliant light, with the marble
eminence looming up before him
and the head of the man who sat
atop this eminence and behind
it, so that one must look up, it
seemed, from very far below to
see him. As if the man were very
high and one were very low, as if
the man were great and one, him-
self, were humble.

The mouth in the middle of the
face of the man who was high and
great was moving and one
strained to catch the sound of
words, but there was only silence,
a terrible, humming silence that
shut one out from this brilliant
place, that made one all alone and
small and very unimportant — too
poor and unimportant to hear the
words that the great man might
be saying. Although it seemed as
if one knew the words, knowing
there were no other words the
great man might be allowed to

say, that he had to say them be-
cause, despite his highness and
his greatness, he was caught in
the self-same trap as the little,
humble being who stood staring
up at him. The words were there,
just beyond some sort of barrier
one could not comprehend, and if
one could pierce that barrier he’d
know the words without having
heard them said. And it was im-
portant that he know them, for
they were of great concern to him
— they were, in fact, about him
and they would affect his life.

His mind went pawing out to
find the barrier and to strip it
from the words and even as he
did, the place of brilliance tilted
and he was back again in the dusk
that flickered.

The white faces still were bent
above him and one of the faces
now came closer, as if it were
floating down upon him — all
alone, all by itself, a small white-
faced balloon. For in the dark one
could not see the body. If there
were a body.

“You’ll be all right,’’ the white
face said. “You are coming
round.”

“Of course I’ll be all right,”
said AJden Street, rather testily.

For he was angry at the words,
angry that here he could hear the
words, but back in that place of
brilliance he could hear no words
at all — words that were impor-
tant, while these words he had
heard were no more than drivel.

FANTASTIC

“Who said 1 wouldn’t be all
right?” asked Alden Street.

And that was who he was, but.
not entirely who he was, for he
was more than just a name. Ev-
ery man, he thought, was more
than just a name. He was many
things.

He was Alden Street and he
was a strange and lonely man
who lived in a great, high, lonely
house that stood above the village
and looked out across a wilder-
ness of swampland that stretched
toward the south until it went out
of sight — farther, much farther
than the human eye could see, a
swamp whose true proportions
could be drawn only on a map.

The house was surrounded by a
great front yard and a garden at
the rear and at the garden’s edge
grew a mighty tree that flamed
golden in the autumn for a few
brief hours, and the tree held
something of magnificent impor-
tance and he, Alden Smith, was
tied in with that great impor-
tance.

H e sought wildly for this great
importance and in the dusk
he could not find it. It had some-
how slipped his grasp. He had had
it, he had known it, he’d lived
with it all his life, from the time
of childhood, but he did not have
it. It had left him somehow.

He went scrabbling after it,
frantically, for it was something
that he could not lose, plunging

after it into the darkness of his
brain. And as he scrambled after
it, he knew the taste again, the
bitter taste when he had drained
the vial and dropped it to the
floor.

He scrabbled in the darkness of
his mind, searching for the thing
he’d lost, not remembering what
it was, with no inkling of what it
might have been, but knowing he
would recognize it once he came
across it.

He scrabbled and he did not
find it. For suddenly he was not in
the darkness of his brain, but
back once more in the place of
brilliance. And angry at how he’d
been thwarted in his search.

The high and mighty man had
not started speaking, although
Alden could see that he was
about to speak, that at any mo-
ment now he would start to
speak. And the strange thing of
it was that he was certain he had
seen this all before and had
heard before what the high, great
man was about to say. Although
he could not, for the life of him,
recall a word of it. He had been
here before, he knew, not once,
but twice before. This was a reel
re-run, this was past happening.

“Alden Street,” said the man
so high above him, “you will
stand and face me.”

And that was silly, Alden
thought, for he was already
standing and already facing him.

“You have heard the evidence,”

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

said the man, “that has been giv-
en here.”

“I heard it,” Alden said.

“What have you, then, to say
in your self-defense?”

“Not a thing,” said Alden,

“You mean you don’t deny it?”

“I can’t deny it’s true. But
there were extenuating circum-
stances.”

“I am sure there were, but
they’re not admissable.”

“You mean that I can’t tell
you . .

“Of course you can. But it will
make no difference. The law ad-
mits no more than the commis-
sion of the crime. There can be
no excuses.”

“I would suppose, then,” said
Alden Street,” there is nothing I
can say. Your Honor, I would not
waste your time.”

“I am glad,” said the judge,
“that you are so realistic. It
makes the whole thing simpler
and easier. And it expedites the
business of this court.”

“But you must understand,”
said Alden Street, “that I can’t
be sent away. I have some most
important work and I should be
getting back to it.”

“You admit,” said the high,
great man, “that you were ill for
twenty-four full hours and failed
most lamentably to report your
illness.”

“Yes,” said Alden Street.

“You admit that even then you
did not report for treatment, but

rather that you were apprehended
by a monitor.”

Alden did not answer. It was
piling up and there was no use to
answer. He could see, quite plain-
ly, that it would do no good.

“And, further, you admit that
it has been some eighteen months
since you have reported for your
physical.”

“I was far too busy.”

“Too busy when the law is most
explicit that you must have a
physical at six month intervals?”

“You don’t understand, Your
Honor.”

His Honor shook his head. “I
am afraid I do. You have placed
yourself above the law. You have
chosen deliberately to flout the
law and you must answer for it.
Too much has been gained by our
medical statutes to endanger
their observance. No citizen can
be allowed to set a precedence
against them. The struggle to
gain a sound and healthy people
must be accorded the support of
each and every one of us and I
cannot countenance . . .”

The place of brilliance tilted
and he was back in the dusk again.

H e lay upon his back and
stared up into the darkness,
and although he could feel the
pressure of the bed on which he
lay, it was as if he were sus-
pended in some sort of dusky lim-
bo that had no beginning and no
end, that was nowhere and led

FANTASTIC

nowhere, and was, in itself, the
terminal point of all and each ex-
istence.

From somewhere deep inside
himself he heard the questioning
once again — the flat, hard voice
that had, somehow, the sound of
metal in it:

Have you ever taken part in
any body-building program?

When was the last time that
you brushed your teeth?

Have you ever contributed ei-
ther time or money to the little
leagues?

How often would you say that
you took a bath?

Did you at any time ever ex-
press a doubt that sports devel-
oped character?

One of the white faces floated
out of the darkness to hang
above him once again. It was, he
saw, an old face — a woman's face
and kind.

A hand slid beneath his head
and lifted it.

“Here,” the white face said,
“drink this.”

He felt the spoon against his
lips.

"It’s soup,” she said. “It’s hot.
It will give you strength.”

He opened his mouth and the
spoon slid in. The soup was hot
and comforting.

The spoon retreated.

“Where . . .” he said.

“Where are you ?”

“Yes,” he whispered, “where
am I? I want to know.”

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

“This is Limbo,” the white face
said.

* * *

Now the word had meaning.

Now he could recall what
Limbo was.

And he could not stay in Limbo.

It was inconceivable that any-
one should expect that he should
stay in Limbo.

He rolled his head back and
forth on the thin, hard pillow in
a gesture of despair.

If he only had more strength.
Just a little while ago he had had
a lot of strength. Old and wiry
and with a lot of strength left in
him. Strong enough for almost
anything at all.

But shiftless, they had said
back in Willow Bend.

And there he had the name. He
was glad to have it back. He
hugged it close against him.

"Willow Bend,” he said, speak-
ing to the darkness.

“You all right, old timer?”

He could not see the speaker,
but he was not frightened. There
was nothing to be frightened of.
He had his name and he had Wil-
low Bend and he had Limbo and
in just a little while he’d have all
the rest of it and then he’d be
whole again and strong.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“Kitty gave you soup. You want
some more of it?”

“No. All I want is to get out of
here,”

“You been pretty sick. Tem-

perature a hundred and one point
seven.”

“Not now. I have no fever
now.”

“No. But when you got here.”

“How come you know about my
temperature? You aren’t any
medic. I can tell by the voice of
you that you aren't any medic.
In Limbo, there would be no
medic.”

“No medic,” said the unseen
speaker. “But I am a doctor.”

“You’re lying,” Alden told him.
“There are no human doctors.
There isn’t any such a thing as
doctors any more. All we have is
medics.”

“There are some of us in re-
search.”

“But Limbo isn’t research.”

"At times,” the voice said, “you
get rather tired of research. It's
too impersonal and sterile.”

A lden did not reply. He ran
his hand, in a cautious rubr-
bing movement, up and down the
blanket that had been used to cov-
er him. It was stiff and hard to
the touch, but seemed fairly
heavy.

He tried to sort out in his mind
what the man had told him.

“There is no one here,” he said,
“but violators. What did you vi-
olate? Forget to trim your toe-
nails? Short yourself on sleep?”
“I’m not a violator.”

“A volunteer, perhaps.”

“Nor a volunteer. It would do

no good to volunteer. They would
not let you in. That’s the point to
Limbo — that’s the dirty rotten
joke. You ignore the medics, so
now the medics ignore you. You
go to a place where there aren’t
any medics and see how well you
like it.”

“You mean that you broke in?”

“You might call it that.”

“You’re crazy,” Alden Street
declared.

For you didn’t break into Lim-
bo. If you were smart at all, you
did your level best to stay away
from it. You brushed your teeth
and bathed and used one of the
several kinds of approved mouth
washes and you took care that
you had your regular check-ups
and you saw to it that you had
some sort of daily exercise and
you watched your diet and you
ran as fast as you could leg it to
the nearest clinic the first mo-
ment you felt ill. Not that you
were often ill. The way they kept
you checked, the way they made
you live, you were very seldom
ill.

He heard that flat, metallic
voice clanging in his brain again,
the disgusted, shocked, accusa-
tory voice of the medic discipli-
nary corps.

Alden Street, it said, you’re
nothing but a dirty slob.

And that, of course, was the
worst thing that he could be
called. There was no other label
that could possibly be worse. It

FANTASTIC

was synonymous with traitor to
the cause of the body beautiful
and healthy.

"This place ?” he asked. "It’s a
hospital ?"

“No,” the doctor said. “There’s
no hospital here. There is nothing
here. Just me and the little that I
know and the herbs and other
woods specifics that I’m able to
command.”

“And this Limbo. What kind of
Limbo is it?”

“A swamp,” the doctor said.
“An ungodly place, believe me.”

“Death sentence?”

“That’s what it amounts to.”

"I can’t die,” said Alden.

“Some day,” the calm voice
said. “All men must.”

“Not yet.”

“No, not yet. You’ll be all right
in a few more hours.”

“What was the matter with
me?”

“You had some sort of fever.”

“But no name for it.”

“Look, how would I know? I
am not . . .”

“I know you’re not a medic.
Humans can’t be medics — not
practicing physicians, not sur-
geons, not anything at all that
has to do with the human body.
But a human can be a medical
research man because that takes
insight and imagination.”

“You’ve thought about this a
lot,” the doctor said.

“Some,” Alden said. “Who has
not?”

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

“Perhaps not as many as you
think. But you are angry. You are
bitter."

“Who wouldn’t be? When you
think about it.”

“I’m not,” the doctor said.
“But you . . .”

“Yes, I of all of us, should be
the bitter one. But I’m not. Be-
cause we did it to ourselves. The
robots didn’t ask for it. We han-
ded it to them.”

A nd that was right, of course,
thought Alden, It had started
long ago when computers had
been used for diagnosis and for
drug dosage computation. And it
had gone on from there. It had
been fostered in the name of
progress. And who was there to
stand in the way of progress?

“Your name,” he said. “I’d like
to know your name.”

“My name is Donald Parker.”
“An honest name,” said Alden
Street. “A good, clean, honest
name.”

“Now go to sleep,” said Parker.
“You have talked toe long.”
“What time is it?”

“It will soon be morning.”
The place was dark as ever.
There was no light at all. There
was no seeing and there was no
sound and there was the smell of
evil dankness. It was a pit,
thought Alden — a pit for that
small portion of humanity which
rebelled against or ignored or
didn’t, for one reason or another,

go along with the evangelistic
fervor of universal health. You
were born into it and educated in
it and you grew up and con-
tinued with it until the day you
died. And it was wonderful, of
course, but, God, how tired you
got of it, how sick you got of it.
Not of the program or the law,
but of the unceasing vigilance, of
the spirit of crusading against
the tiny germ, of the everlasting
tilting against the virus and the
filth, of the almost religious ar-
dor with which the medic corps
kept its constant watch.

Until in pure resentment you
longed to wallow in some filth;
until it became a mark of bravado
not to wash your hands.

For the statutes were quite
clear — illness was a criminal of-
fense and it was a misdemeanor
to fail to carry out even the most
minor pi’ecaution aimed at keep-
ing healthy.

It started with the cradle and
it extended to the grave and there
was a joke, never spoken loudly
(a most pathetic joke), that the
only thing now left to kill a per-
son was a compelling sense of
boredom. In school the children
had stars put against their
names for the brushing of the
teeth, for the washing of the
hands, for regular toilet habits,
for many other tasks. On the
playground there was no longer
anything so purposeless and
foolish (and even criminal) as

haphazard play, but instead me-
ticulously worked out programs
of calisthenics aimed at the
building of the body. There were
sports program on every level,
on the elementary and second-
ary school levels, on the college
level, neighborhood and commu-
nity levels, young folks, young
marrieds, middle-aged and old
folks levels — every kind of sports,
for every taste and season. They
were not spectator sports. If one
knew what was good for him, he
would not for a moment become
anything so useless and so sus-
pect as a sports spectator.

T obacco was forbidden, as
were all intoxicants (tobacco
and intoxicants now being little
more than names enacted in the
laws), and only wholesome foods
were allowed upon the market.
There were no such things now as
candy or soda pop or chewing
gum. These, along with liquor and
tobacco, finally were no more than
words out of a distant past, some-
thing told about in bated breath
by a garrulous oldster who had
heard about them when he was
very young, who might have ex-
perienced or heard about the last
feeble struggle of defiance by the
small fry mobs which had marked
their final stamping out.

No longer were there candy-
runners or pop bootleggers or the
furtive sale in some dark alley of
a pack of chewing gum.

FANTASTIC

Today the people were healthy
and there was no disease — or al-
most no disease. Today a man at
seventy was entering middle age
and could look forward with
some confidence to another forty
years of full activity in his busi-
ness or profession. Today you did
not die at eighty, but barring ac-
cident, could expect to reach a
century and a half.

And this was all to the good,
of course, but the price you paid
was high.

"Donald Parker,” said Alden.

“Yes,” said the voice from the
darkness.

“I was wondering if you were
still here.”

“I was about to leave. I
thought you were asleep.”

“You got in,” said Alden. “All
by yourself, I mean. The medics
didn’t bring you.”

“All by myself,” said Parker

“Then you know the way. An-
other man could follow.”

“You mean someone else could
come in.”

“No. I mean someone could get
out. They could backtrack you.”

“No one here,” said Parker. “I
was in the peak of physical con-
dition and I made it only by the
smallest margin. Another five
miles to go and I'd never made
it.”

“But if one man . . .”

“One man in good health. There
is no one here could make it. Not
even myself.”

“If you could tell me the way.”

"It would be insane," said Par-
ker. “Shut up and go to sleep.”

Alden listened to the other
moving, heading for the unseen
door.

“I’ll make it,” Alden said, not
talking to Parker, nor even to
himself, but talking to the dark
and the world the dark enveloped.

For he had to make it. He must
get back to Willow Bend. There
was something waiting for him
there and he must get back.

» « *

Parker was gone and there was
no one else.

The world was quiet and dark
and dank. The quietness was so
deep that the silence sang inside
one’s head.

Alden pulled his arms up along
his sides and raised himself slow-
ly on his elbows. The blanket fell
off his chest and he sat there on
the bed and felt the chill that
went with the darkness and the
dankness reach out and take hold
of him.

He shivered, sitting there.

He lifted one hand, cautiously,
and reached for the blanket, in-
tending to pull it up around him-
self. But with his fingers clutch-
ing its harsh fabric, he did not
pull it up. For this, he told him-
self, was not the way to do it. He
could not cower in bed, hiding
underneath a blanket.

Instead of pulling it up, he
thrust the blanket from him and

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

his hand went down to feel his
legs. They were encased in cloth
— his trousers still were on him,
and his shirt as well, but his feet
were bare. Maybe his shoes were
beside the bed, with the socks
tucked inside of them. He
reached out a hand and felt, grop-
ing in the dark — and he was not
in bed. He was on a pallet of
some sort, laid ujwn the floor,
and the floor was earth. He could
feel the coldness and the damp-
ness of its packed surface as he
brushed it with his palm.

There were no shoes. He
groped for them in a wide semi-
circle, leaning far out to reach
and sweep the ground.

Someone had put them some-
place else, he thought. Or, per-
haps, someone had stolen them.
In Limbo, more than likely, a
pair of shoes would be quite a
treasure. Or perhaps he’d never
had them. You might not be al-
lowed to take your shoes with
you into Limbo — that might be
part of Limbo.

No shoes, no toothbrushes, no
mouth washes, no proper food,
no medicines or medics. But
there was a doctor here — a hu-
man doctor who had broken in, a
man who had committed himself
to Limbo of his own free will.

What kind of man would you
have to be, he wondered, to do a
thing like that? What motive
would you have to have to drive
you? What kind of idealism, or

what sort of bitterness, to sus-
tain you along the way? What
sort of love, or hate, to stay?

H e sat back on the pallet, giv-
ing up his hunt for shoes,
shaking his head in silent won-
derment at the things a man
could do. The human race, he
thought, was a funny thing. It
paid lip service to reason and to
logic, and yet more often it was
emotion and illogic that served
to shape its ends.

And that, he thought, might be
the reason that all the medics
now were robots. For medicine
was a science that only could be
served by reason and by logic
and there was in the robots noth-
ing that could correspond to the
human weakness of emotion.

Carefully he swung his feet off
the pallet and put them on the
floor, then slowly stood erect. He
stood in dark loneliness and the
dampness of the floor soaked into
his soles.

Symbolic, he thought — unin-
tentional, perhaps, but a perfect
symbolic introduction to the
emptiness of this place called
Limbo.

He reached out his hands, grop-
ing for some point of reference
as he slowly shuffled forward.

He found a wall, made of up-
right boards, rough sawn with
the tough texture of the saw
blade unremoved by any planing,
and with uneven cracks where

FANTASTIC

they had been joined together.

Slowly he felt his way along
them and came at last to the
place they ended. Groping, he
made out that he had found a
doorway, but there was no door.

He thrust a foot over the sill,
seeking for the ground outside,
and found it, almost even with
the sill.

Quickly, as if he might be es-
caping, he swung his body
through the door and now, for the
first time, there was a break in
darkness. The lighter sky etched
the outline of mighty trees and
at some level which stood below
the point he occupied he could
make out a ghostly whiteness
that he guessed was ground fog,
more than likely hanging low
above a lake or stream.

He stood stiff and straight and
took stock of himself. A little
weak and giddy, and a coldness
in his belly and a shiver in his
bones, but otherwise all right.

He put up a hand and rubbed it
along his jaw and the whiskers
grated. A week or more, he
thought, since he had shaved — •
it must have been that long, at
least. He tried to drive his mind
back to find when he’d last
shaved, but time ran together
like an oily fluid and he could
make nothing of it.

He had run out of food and had
gone downtown, the first time in
many days — not wanting to go
even then, but driven by his hun-

ger. There wasn’t time to go,
there was time for nothing, but
there came a time when a man
must eat. How long had it really
been, he wondered, that he’d gone
without a bite to eat, glued to the
task that he was doing, that im-
portant task which he’d now for-
gotten, only knowing that he had
been doing it and that it was un-
finished and that he must get back
to it.

Why had he forgotten? Be-
cause he had been ill? Was it pos-
sible that an illness would make
a man forget?

Let’s start, he thought, at the
first beginning. Let’s take it slow
and simple. One step at a time,
carefully and easily; not all in a
rush.

H IS name was Alden Street
and he lived in a great, high,
lonely house that his parents had
built almost eighty years ago, in
all its pride and arrogance, on
the mound above the village. And
for this building on the mound
above the village, for the pride
and arrogance, his parents had
been hated, but for all the hate
had been accepted since his fa-
ther was a man of learning and
of great business acumen and in
his years amassed a small-sized
fortune dealing in farm mort-
gages and other properties in
Mataloosa county.

With his parents dead, the hate
transferred to him, but not the

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

acceptance that had gone hand-
in-hand with hate, for although
he had a learning gathered from
several colleges, he put it to no
use — at least to no use which had
made it visible to the village. He
did not deal in mortgages nor in
properties. He lived alone in the
great, high house that now had
gone to ruin, using up, bit by bit,
the money his father had laid by
and left him. He had no friends
and he sought no friends. There
were times when he did not ap-
pear on the village streets for
weeks on end, although it was
known that he was at home. For
watching villagers could see the
lights burning in the high and
lonesome house, come nights.

At one time the house had been
a fine place, but now neglect and
years had begun to take their toll.
There were shutters that hung
crooked and a great wind years
before had blown loosened bricks
from the chimney top and some
of the fallen bricks still lay upon
the roof. The paint had peeled
and powdered off and the front
stoop had sunk, its foundation
undermined by a busily burrow-
ing gopher and the rains that fol-
lowed. Once the lawn had been
neatly kept, but now the grass
grew rank and the shrubs no
longer knew the shears and the
trees were monstrous growths
that almost screened the house
from view. The flower beds, cher-
ished by his mother, now were

gone, long since choked out by
weeds and creeping grass.

It was a shame, he thought,
standing in the night. I should
have kept the place the way my
mother and my father kept it,
but there were so many other
things.

The people in the village de-
spised him for his shiftlessness
and his thoughtlessness which al-
lowed the pride and arrogance
to fall into ruin and decay. For
hate as they might the arro-
gance, they still were proud of it.
They said he was no good. They
said that he was lazy and that
he didn’t care.

But I did care, he thought. I
cared so very deeply, not for the
house, not for the village, not
even for myself. But for the job
— the job that he had not select-
ed, but rather that had been
thrust upon him.

Or was it a job, he wondered,
so much as a dream?

Let’s start at the first begin-
ning, he had told himself, and
that was what he had meant to
do, but he had not started at the
first beginning; he had started
near the end. He had started a
long way from the first begin-
ning.

H e stood in the darkness, with
the treetops outlined by the
lighter sky and the white ghost
fog that lay close above the wa-
ter, and tried to swim against

FANTASTIC

the tide of time back to that first
beginning, back to where it all
had started. It was far away, he
knew, much farther than he’d
thought, and it had to do, it
seemed, with a late September
butterfly and the shining gold of
falling walnut leaves.

He had been sitting in a gar-
den and he had been a child. It
was a blue and wine-like autumn
day and the air was fresh and
the sun was warm, as anything
only can be fresh and warm when
one is very young.

The leaves were falling from
the tree above in a golden rain
and he put out his hands to catch
one of the falling leaves, not try-
ing to catch any single one of
them, but holding out his hands
and knowing that one of them
would drift into a palm — holding
out his hands with an utter child-
ish faith, using up in that single
instant the only bit of unques-
tioning faith that any man can
know.

He closed his eyes and tried to
capture it again, tried to become
in this place of distant time the
little boy he had been on that day
the gold had rained down.

He was there, but it was hazy
and it was not bright and the
clearness would not come — for
there was something happening,
there was a half-sensed shadow
out there in the dark and the
squish of wet shoes walking on
the earth.

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

His eyes snapped open and the
autumn day was gone and some-
one was moving toward him
through the night, as if a piece of
the darkness had detached itself
and had assumed a form and was
moving forward.

He heard the gasp of breath
and the squish of shoes and then
the movement stopped.

“You there,’’ said a sudden,
husky voice. “You standing there,
who are you?’’

“I am new here. My name is
Alden Street.’’

“Oh, yes,’’ the voice said. “The
new one. I was coming up to see
you.”

“That was good of you,” said
Alden.

“We take care of one another
here,” the voice said. “We care
for one another. We are the only
ones there are. We really have to
care.”

“But you. . . .”

“I am Kitty,” said the voice.
“I’m the one who fed you soup.”
* * *

She struck the match and held
it cupped within her hands as if
she sought to protect the tiny
flame against the darkness.

Just the three of us, thought
Alden — the three of us arraigned
against the dark. For the blaze
was one of them, it had become
one with them, holding life and
movement, and it strove against
the dark.

He saw that her fingers were

thin and sensitive, delicate as
some old vase fashioned out of
porcelain.

She bent with the flame still
cupped within her hand and
touched it to a candle stub thrust
into a bottle that, /rom the
height of it, stood upon a table,
although one could not see the
table.

“We don’t often have a light,”
said Kitty. “It is a luxury we
seldom can afford. Our matches
are so few and the candles are so
short. We have so little here.”

“There is no need,” said Alden.

“But there is,” said Kitty.
“You are a new one here. We
cannot let you go stumbling in
the dark. For the first little while
we make a light for you.”

The candle caught and gut-
tered, sending flickering shadows
fleeing wildly. Then it steadied
and its feeble glow cut a circle in
the dark.

“It will soon be morning,” Kit-
ty told him, “and then the day
will come and the light of day is
worse than the darkness of the
night. For in the day you see and
know. In the dark, at least, you
can think that it is not too bad.
But this is best of all — a little
pool of light to make a house in-
side the darkness.”

She was not young, he saw.
Her hair hung in dank strings
about her face and her face was
pinched and thin and there were
lines upon it. But there was, he

thought, back of the stringiness
and the thinness and the lines, a
sense of some sort of eternal
youthfulness and vitality that
nothing yet had conquered.

The pool of light had spread a
little as the flame had settled
down and now he could see the
place in which they stood.

TT was small, no more than a

hut. There was the pallet on
the floor and the blanket where
he’d tossed it from him. There
was a crazy-legged table upon
which the candle stood and two
sawed blocks of wood to serve as
chairs. There were two plates
and two white cups standing on
the table.

Cracks gaped between the up-
right boards that formed the
walls of the hut and in other
places knots had dried and fallen
out, leaving peepholes to the
world outside.

“This was your place,” he said.
“I would not have inconvenienced
you.”

“Not my place,” she said.
“Harry’s place, but it’s all right
with Harry.”

“I’ll have to thank him.”

“You can’t,” she said. “He’s
dead. It is your place now.”

“I won’t need a place for long,”
said Alden. “I won’t be staying
here. I’ll be going back.”

She shook her head.

“Is there anyone who’s tried?”

“Yes. They’ve all come back.

FANTASTIC

You can’t beat the swamp.”

‘‘Doc grot in."

“Doc was big and strong and
well. And there was something
driving him.”

“There’s something driving me
as well.”

She put up a hand and brushed
the hair out of her eyes. “No one
can talk you out of this? You
mean what you are saying?”

“I can’t stay,” he said.

“In the morning,” she told him,
“I’ll take you to see Eric.”

The candle flame was yellow
as it flickered in the room and
again the golden leaves were
raining down. The garden had
been quiet and he’d held out his
hands, palms upward, so the
leaves would fall in them. Just
one leaf, he thought — one leaf is
all I want, one leaf out of all the
millions that are falling.

He watched intently and the
leaves went past, falling all
about him, but never a one to fall
into his hands. Then, suddenly,
there was something that was
not a leaf — a butterfly that came
fluttering like a leaf from no-
where, blue as the haze upon the
distant hills, blue as the smoky
air of autumn.

For an instant the butterfly
poised above his outstretched
palms and then mounted swiftly
upward, flying strongly against
the downward rain of leaves, a
mote of blue winging in the gold-
enness.

He watched it as it flew, until
it was lost in the branches of the
tree, and then glanced back at his
hands and there was something
lying in his palm, but it was not
a leaf.

It was a little card, two inches
by three or such a matter, and
it was the color of the leaves,
but its color came from what
seemed to be an inner light, so
that the card shone of itself
rather than shining by reflected
light, which was the way one saw
the color of the leaves.

He sat there looking at it,
wondering how he could catch a
card when no cards were falling,
but only leaves dropping from
the tree. But he had taken it and
looked at it and it was not made
of paper and it had upon its face
a picture that he could not under-
stand.

A S he stared at it his mother’s
voice called him in to supper
and he went. He put the card into
his pocket and he went into the
house.

And under ordinary circum-
stances the magic would have
vanished and he never would have
known such an autumn day again.

There is only one such day,
thought Alden Street, for any
man alive. For any man alive,
with the exception of himself.

He had put the card into his
pocket and had gone into the
house for supper and later on

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

that evening he must have put it
in the drawer of the dresser in
his room, for that was where he’d
found it in that later autumn.

He had picked it up from its
forgotten resting place and as he
held it in his hand, that day of
thirty years before came back to
him so clearly that he could al-
most smell the freshness of the
air as it had been that other aft-
ernoon. The butterfly was there
and its blueness was so precise
and faithful that he knew it had
been imprinted on his brain so
forcefully that he held it now for-
ever.

He had put the card back care-
fully and had walked down to the
village to seek out the realtor
he’d seen the day before.

“But, Alden,” said the realtor,
“with your mother gone and all,
there is no reason for your stay-
ing. There is that job waiting in
New York. You told me yester-
day.”

“I’ve been here too long,” said
Alden. “I am tied too close. I
guess I’ll have to stay. The house
is not for sale.”

"You’ll live there all alone? In
that big house all alone?”

“There’s nothing else to do,”
said Alden.

He had turned and walked
away and gone back to the house
to get the card out of the dresser
drawer again.

He sat and studied the drawing
that was on the face of it, a funny

sort of drawing, no kind of draw-
ing he had ever seen before, not
done with ink or pencil nor with
brush. What, in the name of God,
he thought, had been used to
draw it?

And the drawing itself? A
many-pointed star? A rolled-up
porcupine? Or a gooseberry, one
of the prickly kind, many times
enlarged?

It did not matter, he knew,
neither how the drawing had been
made, or the strange kind of
stiff, silken fabric that made the
card itself, or what might be
represented in the drawing. The
important thing was that, many
years before, when he had been a
child, he had sat beneath the
tree and held out his hand to
catch a falling leaf and had
caught the card instead.

He carried the card over to a
window and stared out at the
garden. The great walnut tree
still stood as it had stood that
day, but it was not golden yet.
The gold must wait for the com-
ing of first frost and that might
be any day.

He stood at the window, won-
dering if there’d be a butterfly
this time, or if the butterfly were
only part of childhood.

“It will be morning soon,”
said Kitty. "I heard a bird. The
birds are astir just before first
light.”

“Tell me about this place,”
said Alden.

FANTASTIC

“It is a sort of island,” Kitty
told him. “Not much of an island.
Just a foot or two above the wa-
ter level. It is surrounded by wa-
ter and by muck. They bring us
in by heliocoptor and they let us
down. They bring in food the
same way. Not enough to feed
us. Not enough of anything.
There is no contact with them.”

“Men or robots? In the ship, I
mean.”

“I don’t know. No one ever sees
them. Robots, I’d suspect.”

“Not enough food, you say.”

S HE shook her head. “There is
not supposed to be. That’s a
part of Limbo. We’re not sup-
posed to live. We fish, we gather
roots and other things. We get
along somehow.”

“And we die^ of course.”
“Death comes to everyone,”
she said. “To us just a little
sooner.”

She sat crouched upon one of
the lengths of wood that served
as a chair and as the candle gut-
tered, shadows chased across her
face so that it seemed the very
flesh of it was alive and crawling.

“You missed sleep on account
of me,” he said.

“I can sleep any time. I don’t
need much sleep. And, besides,
when a new one comes . .

“There aren’t many new
ones ?”

“Not as many as there were.
And there always is a chance.

With each new one there’s a
chance.”

“A chance of what?”

“A chance he may have an an-
swer for us.”

“We can always run away.”

“To be caught and brought
back? To die out in the swamp?
That, Alden, is no answer.”

She rocked her body back and
forth. “I suppose there is no an-
swer.”

But she still held hope, he
knew. In the face of all of it, she
had kept a hope alive.

« « «

Eric once had been a huge man,
but now he had shrunken in upon
himself. The strength of him was
there as it had always been, but
the stamina was gone. You could
see that, Alden told himself, just
by looking at him.

Eric sat with his back against
a tree. One hand lay in his lap and
the other grubbed idly, with blunt
and dirty fingers, at the short
ground.

“So you’re bent on getting
out?” he asked.

“He talked of nothing else,”
said Kitty.

“You been here how long?”

“They brought me here last
night. I was out on my feet. I
don’t remember it.”

“You don’t know what it’s
like.”

Alden shook his head. “I don’t
intend to find out, either. I figure
if I’m going. I’d best be going

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

now before this place wears me
down.”

‘‘.Let me tell you,” Eric said.
‘‘Let me tell you how it is. The
swamp is big and we’re in the
center of it. Doc came in from
the north. He found out, some
way, the location of this place,
hnd he got hold of some old maps.
Geologic survey maps that had
been made years ago. He studied
them and figured out the best
way for getting in. He made it,
partly because he was strong and
healthy . . . but mostly it was
luck. A dozen other men could
try it, just as strong as he was,
and all of them might be lost be-
cause they weren’t lucky. There
are quicksand and alligators.
There are moccasins and rattle-
snakes. There is the killing heat.
There are the insects and no wa-
ter fit to drink.

‘‘Maybe if you knew exactly
the way to go you might manage
it, but you’d have to hunt for the
way to go. You’d have to work
your way through the swamp and
time after time you’d run into
something that you couldn’t get
through or over and have to turn
back and hunt another way.
You’d lose a lot of time and time
would work against you.”

‘‘How about food?”

‘‘If you weren’t fussy, food
would be no trouble. You could
find food along the way. Not the
right kind. Your belly might not
like it. You’d probably have dys-

entery. But you wouldn’t starve.”

“This swamp,” asked Alden,
"where is it?”

"Part in Mataloosa county.
Part in Fairview. It’s a local
Limbo. They all are local Lim-
bos. There aren’t any big ones.
Just a lot of little ones.”

Alden shook his head. “I can
see this swamp from the win-
dows of my house. I never heard
of a Limbo being in it.”

“It’s not advertised,” said
Eric. “It’s not put on maps. It’s
not something you’d hear of.”

“How many miles ? How far to
the edge of it?”

“Straight line, maybe thirty,
maybe forty. You’d not be travel-
ing a straight line.”

“And the perimeter is guard-
ed.”

“Patrols flying overhead.
Watching for people in the
swamp. They might not spot you.
You’d do your best to stay under
cover. But chances are they
would. And they’d be waiting for
you when you reached the edge.”

“And even if they weren’t,”
Kitty said, “where would you go?
A monitor would catch you. Or
someone would spot you and re-
port. No one would dare to help
a refugee from Limbo.”

T he tree beneath which Eric
sat was a short distance from
the collection of huddled huts
that served as shelter for the in-
habitants of Limbo.

FANTASTIC

Someone, Aiden saw, had built
up the community cooking fire
and a bent and ragged man was
coming up from the water’s edge,
carrying a morning’s catch of
fish. A man was lying in the
shade of one of the huts,
stretched out on a pallet. Others,
both men and women, sat in list-
less groups.

The sun had climbed only part
way up the eastern sky, but the
heat was stifling. Insects buzzed
shrilly in the air and high in the
light blue sky birds were swing-
ing in great and lazy circles.

"Doc would let us see his
maps ?’’

“Maybe," Eric said. "You
could ask him."

“I spoke to him last night,”
said Aiden. “He said it was in-
sane."

“He is right,” said Eric.

“Doc has funny notions,” Kitty
said. “He doesn’t blame the ro-
bots. He says they're just doing
a job that men have set for them.
It was men who made the laws.
The robots do no more than carry
out the laws.”

And Doc, thought Aiden, once
again was right.

Although it was hard to puzzle
out the road by which man had
finally come to his present situa-
tion. It was overemphasis again,
perhaps, and that peculiar social
blindness which came as the re-
sult of overemphasis.

Certainly, when one thought of

it, it made no particular sense.
A man had a right to be ill. It
was his own hard luck if he hap-
pened to be ill. It was no one’s
business but his own. And yet
it had been twisted into an action
that was on a par with murder.
As a result of a well-intentioned
health crusade which had gotten
out of hand, what at one time
had been misfortune had now
become a crime.

Eric glanced at Aiden. “Why
are you so anxious to get out?
It’ll do no good. Someone will find
you, someone will turn you in.
You’ll be brought back again.”

“Maybe a gesture of defiance,”
Kitty said. "Sometimes a man
will do a lot to prove he isn’t
licked. To show he can’t be
licked."

“How old are you?” asked
Eric.

“Fifty four,” said Aiden.

“Too old,” said Eric. “I am
only forty and I wouldn’t want
to try it.”

"Is it defiance?” Kitty asked.

“No,” Aiden told her, “not
that. I wish it was. But it’s not
as brave as that. There is some-
thing that’s unfinished.”

“All of us,” said Eric, “left
some unfinished things behind
us.”

« « «

The water was black as ink
and seemed more like oil than
water. It was lifeless ; there was
no sparkle in it and no glint; it

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

soaked up the sunlight rather
than reflecting it. And yet one
felt that life must lurk beneath
it, that it was no more than a
mask to hide the life beneath it.

It was no solid sheet of water,
but an infiltrating water that
snaked its way around the hum-
mocks and the little grassy is-
lands and the water-defying trees
that stood knee-deep in it. And
when one glanced into the swamp,
seeking to find some pattern to it,
trying to determine what kind of
beast it was, the distance turned
to a cruel and ugly greenness and
the water, too, took on that tint
of fatal green.

Alden crouched at the water’s
edge and stared into the swamp,
fascinated by the rawness of the
green.

Forty miles of it, he thought.
How could a man face forty
miles of it? But it would be more
than forty miles. For, as Eric
had said, a man would run into
dead-ends and would be forced to
retrace his steps to find another
way.

Twenty-four hours ago, he
thought, he had not been here.
Twenty four hours ago or a little
more he had left the house and
gone down into the village to buy
some groceries. And when he
neared the bank corner he had
remembered that he had not
brushed his teeth — for how long
had it been? — and that he had not
bathed for days. He should have

taken a bath and brushed his
teeth and done all the other things
that were needful before he had
come down town, as he always
had before — or almost every time
before, for there had been a time
or two as he passed the bank that
the hidden monitor had come to
sudden life and bawled in me-
tallic tones that echoed up and
down the street: ‘‘Alden Street
did not brush his teeth today!
Shame on Alden Street, he did
not brush his teeth (or take a
bath, or clean his fingernails, or
wash his hands and face, or what-
ever it might be.)” Keeping up
the clatter and the clamor, with
the ringing of alarm bells and the
sound of booming rockets inter-
spersed between each shaming
accusation, until one ran off home
in shame to do the things he’d
failed.

In a small village, he thought,
you could get along all right. At
least you could until the medics
got around to installing home
monitors as they had in some of
the larger cities. And that might
take them years.

But in Willow Bend it was not
so hard to get along. If you just
remembered to comply with all
the regulations you would be all
right. And even if you didn’t, you
knew the locations of the moni-
tors, one at the bank and the oth-
er at the drugstore corner, and
you could keep out of their way.
They couldn’t spot your short-

FANTASTIC

comings more than a block away.

A lthough generally it was
safer to comply with the reg-
ulations before you went down
town. And this, as a rule, he’d
done, although there had been a
time or two when he had forgot-
ten and had been forced to go
running home with people stand-
ing in the street and snickering
and small boys catcalling after
him while the monitor kept up its
unholy din. And later on that day,
or maybe in the evening, the lo-
cal committee would come call-
ing and would collect the fine that
was set out in the book for minor
misdemeanors.

But on this morning he had not
thought to take a bath, to brush
his teeth, to clean his fingernails,
to make certain that his toenails
were trimmed properly and neat.
He had worked too hard and for
too long a time and had missed
a lot of sleep (which, also, was a
thing over which the monitor
could work itself into a lather)
and, remembering back, he could
recall that he seemed to move in
a hot, dense fog and that he was
weak from hunger and there was
a busy, perhaps angry fly buzzing
in his head.

But he did remember the mon-
itor at the bank in time and de-
toured a block out of his way to
miss it. But as he came up to the
grocery store (a safe distance
from the bank and the drugstore

monitors), he had heard that
hateful metallic voice break out
in a scream of fright and indig-
nation.

“Alden Street is ill!” it
screamed. "Everybody stay away
from Alden Street. He is ill —
don’t anyone go near him!”

The bells had rung and the si-
ren blown and the rockets been
shot off, and from atop the gro-
cery store a great red light was
flashing.

He had turned to run, knowing
the dirty trick that had been
played upon him. They had
switched one of the monitors to
the grocery, or they had installed
a third.

"Stay where you are!” the
monitor had shouted after him.
"Go out into the middle of the
street away from everyone.”

And he had gone. He had quit
his running and had gone out into
the middle of the street and
stayed there, while from the win-
dows of the business houses
white and frightened faces had
stared out at him. Had stared out
at him — a sick man and a crimi-
nal.

The monitor had kept on with
its awful crying and he had
cringed out there while the white
and frightened faces watched and
in time (perhaps a very short
time, although it had seemed
long), the disciplinary robots on
the medic corps had arrived from
the county seat.

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

Things had moved swiftly
then. The whole story had come
out. Of how he had neglected to
have his physicals. Of how he
had been fined for several mis-
demeanors. Of how he had not
contributed to the little league
programs. Of how he had not tak-
en part in any of the various
community health and sports
programs.

They had told him then, in
wrath, that he was nothing but a
dirty slob, and the wheels of jus-
tice had moved with sure and
swift precision. And finally he
had stood and stared up at the
high and mighty man who had
pronounced his doom. Although
he could not recall that he had
heard the doom. There had been a
blackness and that was all that
he could remember until he had
awakened into a continuation of
the blackness and had seen two
balloon-like faces leaning over
him.

H B had been apprehended and
judged and sentenced within
a few short hours. And it was all
for the good of men — to prove to
other men that they could not
get away with the fiouting of the
law which said that one must
maintain his fitness and his
health. For one’s health, said the
law, was the most precious thing
one had and it was criminal to
endanger it or waste it. The na-
tional health must be viewed as

a vital natural resource and, once
again, it was criminal to endan-
ger it or waste it.

So he had been made into a
horrible example and the story of
what had happened to him would
have appeared on the front pages
of every paper that was pub-
lished and the populace thus
would be admonished that they
must obey, that the health laws
were not namby-pamby laws.

He squatted by the water’s
edge and stared off across the
swamp and behind him he heard
the muted sounds which came
from that huddled camp just a
short ways down the island — ^the
clang of the skillet or the pot, the
thudding of an axe as someone
chopped up firewood, the rustle
of the breeze that fiapped a piece
of canvas stretched as a door
across a hut, the quiet murmur
of voices in low and resigned
talks.

The swamp had a deadly look
about it — and it waited. Confi-
dent and assured, certain that no
one could cross it. All its traps
were set and all its nets were
spread and it had a patience that
no man could match.

Perhaps, he thought, it did not
really wait. Maybe it was just a
little silly to imagine that it
waited. Rather, perhaps, it was
simply an entity that did not
care. A human life to it was
nothing. To it a human life was
no more precious than a snake’s

FANTASTIC

life, or the life of a dragonfly, or
of a tiny fish. It would not help
and it would not warn and it had
no kindness.

He shivered, thinking of this
great uncaring. An uncaring that
was even worse than if it waited
with malignant forethought. For
if it waited, at least it was aware
of you. At least it paid you the
compliment of some slight im-
portance.

Even in the heat of the day, he
felt the slimy coldness of the
swamp reaching out for him and
he shrank back from it, knowing
as he did that he could not face
it. Despite all the brave words
he had mouthed, all his resolu-
tion, he would not dare to face it.
It was too big for a man to
fight — it was too green and
greedy.

He hunkered in upon himself,
trying to compress himself into
a ball of comfort, although he
was aware that there was no
comfort. There never would be
comfort, for now he’d failed him-
self.

In a little while, he thought,
he’d have to get up from where
he crouched and go down to the
huts. And once he went down
there, he knew he would be lost,
that he would become one with
those others who likewise could
not face the swamp. He would
live out his life there, fishing for
some food, chopping a little
wood, caring for the sick, and

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

sitting listless in the sun.

He felt a fiare of anger at the
system which would sentence a
man to such a life as that and he
cursed the robots, knowing as he
cursed that they were not the
ones who were responsible. The
robots were a symbol only of the
health law situation.

They had been made the physi-
cians and the surgeons to the hu-
man race because they were quick
as well as steady, because their
judgment was unfrayed by any
flicker of emotion, because they
were as dedicated as the best of
human doctors ever had been, be-
cause they were tireless and un-
thinking of themselves.

And that was well and good.
But the human race, as it always
did, had gone overboard. It had
made the robot not only the good
and faithful doctor, but it had
made him guardian and czar of
human health, and in doing this
had concocted a metallic ogre.

W OULD there ever be a day,
he wondered, when humans
would be done for good and all
with its goblins and its ogres?

The anger faded out and he
crouched dispirited and afraid
and all alone beside the black wa-
ters of the swamp.

A coward, he told himself. And
there was a bitter taste inside
his brain and a weakness in his
belly.

Get up, he told himself. Get

up and go down to the huts.

But he didn’t. He stayed, as if
there might be some sort of re-
prieve, as if he might be hoping
that from some unknown and un-
probed source he might dredge
up the necessary courage to walk
into the swamp.

But the hope, he knew, was a
hollow hope.

He had come to the end of hope.
Ten years ago he could have done
it. But not now. He’d lost too
much along the way.

He heard the footsteps behind
him and threw a look across his
shoulders.

It was Kitty.

She squatted down beside him.

“Eric is getting the stuff to-
gether,’’ she told him. “He’ll be
along in a little while.”

“The stuff?”

“Food. A couple of machetes.
Some rope.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“He was just waiting for
someone who had the guts to
tackle it. He figures that you
have. He always said one man
didn’t have a chance, but maybe
two men had. Two men, helping
one another, just might have a
chance.”

“But he told me . . .”

“Sure. I know what he told you.
What I told you, too. And even
in the face of that, you never
wavered. That is how we knew.”

“We?”

“Of course,” said Kitty. “The

three of us. I am going, too.”
* * *

It took the swamp four days to
beat the first of them.

Curiously, it was Eric, the
youngest and the strongest.

He stumbled as they walked
along a narrow ridge of land,
flanked by tangled brush on one
hand, by a morass on the other.

Alden, who was following,
helped him to his feet, but he
could not stand. He staggered
for a step or two, then collapsed
again.

“Just a little rest,” Eric pant-
ed. “Just a little rest and then
I’ll be able to go on.”

He crawled, with Alden help-
ing, to a patch of shade, lay flat
upon his back, a limp figure of a
man.

Kitty sat beside him and
stroked his hair back from his
forehead.

“Maybe you should build a
fire,” she said to Alden. “Some-
thing hot may help him. All of us
could use a bit of something."

Alden turned off the ridge and
plunged into the brush. The foot-
ing was soft and soggy and in
places he sank in muck half way
to his knees.

He found a small dead tree and
pulled branches off it. The fire,
he knew, must be small, and of
wood that was entirely dry, for
any sign of smoke might alert
the patrol that flew above the
swamp.

FANTASTIC

Back on the ridge again, he
used a machete to slice some
shavings off a piece of wood and
stacked it all with care. It must
start on one match, for they had
few matches.

Kitty came and knelt beside
him, watching.

“Eric is asleep,” she said.
“And it’s not just tuckered out.
I think he has a fever.”

“It’s the middle of the after-
noon,” said Alden. “We’ll stay
here until morning. He may feel
better, then. Some extra rest may
put him on his feet.”

“And if it doesn’t ?”

“We’ll stay another day,” he
said. “The three of us together.
That’s what we said back there.
We would stick together.”

She put out a hand and laid it
on his arm.

“I was sure you’d say that,”
she said. “Eric was so sure and
he was so right. He said you were
the man he had been waiting
for.”

Alden shook his head. “It’s
not only Eric,” he declared. “It’s
not only us. It’s those others
back there. Kemember how they
helped us? They gave us food,
even when it meant they might go
a bit more hungry. They gave us
two fishhooks out of the six they
had. One of them copied the map
that Doc had carried. They fixed
up a pair of shoes for me be-
cause they said I wasn’t used to
going without shoes. And they all

came to see us off and watched
until we were out ef sight.”

He paused and looked at her.

“It’s not just us,” he said. “It’s
all of us . all of us in Lim-
bo.”

She put up a hand and brushed
the hair out of her eyes.

“Did anyone,” he asked her,
“ever tell you that you are beau-
tiful?”

She made a grimace. “Long
ago,” she said. “But not for
years. Life had been too hard.
But once, I guess, you could have
said that I was beautiful.”

She made a fluttery motion
with her hands. “Light the fire,”
she told him. “Then go and catch
some fish. Laying over this way,
we’ll need the food.”

* * *

A lden woke at the first faint
edge of dawn and lay staring
out across the inky water that
looked, in the first flush of day,
like a floor of black enamel that
had just been painted and had not
dried as yet, with the shine of
wetness showing here and there.
A great awkward bird launched
itself off a dead tree stub and
flapped ungracefully down to
skim above the water so that lit-
tle ripples ran in the black enam-
el.

Stiffly, Alden sat up. His bones
ached from the dampness and he
was stiff with the chill of night.

A short distance away, Kitty
lay curled into a ball, still sleep-

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

. ing. He glanced toward the spot
where Eric had been sleeping
when he himself had gone to bed,
and there was no one there.

Startled, he leaped to his feet.

“Eric!” he called.

There was no answer.

“Eric!" he shouted again.

Kitty uncoiled and sat up.

“He’s gone,” said Alden. “I
just woke up and he wasn’t
there.”

He walked over to where the
man had been lying and the im-
print of his body still was in the
grass.

He bent to examine the ground
and brushed his hand across it.
Some of the blades of grass
yielded to his touch; they were
beginning to spring back, to
stand erect again. Eric, he knew,
had not left just a little while
ago. He had been gone — for how
long, for an hour, for two hours
or more?

Kitty rose and came to stand
beside him.

Alden got to his feet and faced
her.

“He was sleeping when I
looked at him before I went to
sleep,” he said. “Muttering in his
sleep, but sleeping. He still had a
fever.”

“Maybe,” she said, “one of us
should have sat up to watch him.
But he seemed to be all right.
And we were all tired.”

Alden looked up and down the
ridge. There was nothing to be

seen, no sign of the missing man.

“He might have wandered off,”
he said. “Woke up, delirious. He
might just have taken off.”

And if that were the situation,
they might never find him. He
might have fallen into a pool of
water, or become trapped in
muck or quicksand. He might be
lying somewhere, exhausted with
his effort, very quietly dying.

Alden walked off the ridge into
the heavy brush that grew out of
the muck. Carefully, he scouted
up and down the ridge and there
was no sign that anyone, except
himself the afternoon before,
had come off the ridge. And there
would have been some sign, for
when one stepped into the muck,
he went in to his ankles, in
places halfway to his knees.

Mosquitoes and other insects
buzzed about him maddeningly as
he floundered through the brush
and somewhere far off a bird was
making chunking sounds.

He stopped to rest and regain
his breath, waving his hands
about his face to clear the air of
insects.

The chunking still kept on and
now there was another sound. He
listened for the second sound to
be repeated.

“Alden,” came the cry again,
so faint he barely heard it.

He plunged out of the brush
back onto the ridge. The cry had
come from the way that they had
traveled on the day before.

FANTASTIC

“Alden!” And now he knew
that it was Kitty, and not Eric,
calling.

Awkwardly, he galloped down
the ridge toward the sound.

K itty was crouched at the
edge of a thirty-foot stretch
of open water, where the ridge
had broken and let the water in.

He stopped beside her and
looked down. She was pointing at
a footprint — a footprint heading
the wrong way. It lay beside oth-
er footprints heading in the oppo-
site direction, the footprints that
they had made in the mud as
they came along the ridge the
day before.

“We didn’t stop,” said Kitty.
"We kept right on. That can't be
one of ours. You weren’t down
here, were you?”

He shook his head.

“Then it must be Eric.”

“You stay here,” he said.

He plunged into the water and
waded across and on the other
edge the tracks were going out —
tracks heading back the way that
they had come.

He stopped and shouted.
“Eric! Eric! Eric!”

He waited for an answer.
There was nothing.

A mile farther on, he came to
the great morass they had
crossed the day before — the mile
or more of muck and water that
had eaten at their strength. And
here, on the muddy edge, the

tracks went into the sea of suck-
in';' mud and water and disap-
peared from sight.

He crouched on the shore and
peered across the water, inter-
spersed by hummocks that were
poison green in the early light.
There was no sign of life or
movement. Once a fish (perhaps
not a fish, perhaps only some-
thing) broke the water for an in-
stant, sending out a circle of rip-
ples. But that was all there was.

Heavily, he turned back.

Kitty still crouched beside the
water’s edge.

He shook his head at her.

“He went back,” he said. “I
don’t see how he could have. He
was weak and . . .”

“Determination,” Kitty said.
“And, perhaps, devotion, too.”

“Devotion?”

“Don’t you see,” she said. “He
knew that he was sick. He knew
he couldn’t make it. And he knew
that we’d stay with him.”

“But that’s what we all
agreed,” said Alden.

Kitty shook her head. “He
wouldn’t have it that way. He is
giving us a chance.”

“No!” yelled Alden. “I won’t
let him do it. I’m going back and
find him.”

“Across that last stretch of
swamp ?” asked Kitty.

Alden nodded. “Probably he
was just able to make it. He
more than likely is holed up
the other side somewhere.”

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

“And what if he didn’t make
it? What if he never got across?"

“Then I won’t find him, of
course. But I have to try.”

“What I’m worried about,”
said Kitty, “is what you’d do if
you did find him. What would
you do about him? What would
you say to him?”

“I’d bring him back,” said Al-
den, “or I’d stay with him.”

She lifted her face and tears
were standing in her eyes. “You’d
give him back his gift,” she said.
“You’d throw it in his face.
You’d make this last great ges-
ture of his mean absolutely noth-
mg.

She looked at Alden. “You
could do that?” she asked. “He
has done a fine and decent thing.
Thinking, perhaps, that it’s the
last chance he’ll have for decency.
And you wouldn’t let him keep
it?”

Alden shook his head.

“He’d do as much for you,” she
said. “He’d let you keep that final
decency.”

* » «

O N the morning of the eighth
day, Kitty moaned and
tossed with fever. The day be-
fore had been a sunlit nightmare
of mud and saw grass, of terrible
heat, of snakes and mosquitoes,
of waning hope and a mounting
fear that stirred sluggishly in the
middle of one’s gut.

It had been crazy for them to
try it, Alden thought, crazy from

the very start — three people who
had no right to try it, too out of
condition, too ill-equipped, and
in his case, at least, too old to
try a thing like this. To cross
forty miles of swamp took youth
and strength, and all that any of
the three of them had to qualify
had been determination. Perhaps,
he thought, a misplaced determi-
nation, each of them driven by
something which, more than like-
ly, they did not understand.

Why, he wondered, had Kitty
and Eric wished to escape from
Limbo?

It was something they had
never talked about. Although
perhaps they would have if there
had been a lot of talk. But there
had never been. There had been
no time or breath for talk.

For, he realized now, there was
no real escape. You could escape
the swamp, but you could not flee
from Limbo. For you became a
part of Limbo. Once in Limbo
and there was no place left for
you in the outside world.

Had it been a gesture only, he
wondered — a gesture of difiance.
Like that foolish, noble gesture
of Eric’s in leaving them when
he had fallen ill.

And the question of their deci-
sion back there came to haunt
him once again.

All he had to do, even in the
glare of noonday sun, was to shut
his eyes and see it all again — a
starving, helpless, dying man

FANTASTIC

who had crawled off the path and
hidden in a clump of tangled un-
derbrush so he could not be found
even if one, or both, of his com-
panions should come seeking him.
There were flies crawling on his
face and he dare not (or could
not?) raist. a hand to brush them
off. There was a gaunt, black
bird sitting on a dead tree, stub,
waiting patiently, and there was
an alligator that lay in the water
watching and there were many
crawling, creeping, hopping crea-
tures swarming in the grass and
in the stunted brush.

The vision never changed; it
was a fixed and terrible vision
painted in a single stroke by im-
agination, which then had walked
away and let it stand in all its
garish detail.

Now it was Kitty, lying there
and moaning through clenched
teeth — an old and useless woman
as he was an old and useless
man. Kitty, with her lined face
and her straggly hair and the
terrible gauntness of her, but
still possessed of that haunting
sense of eternal youth somehow
trapped tight inside her body.

H e should go, he thought, and
get some water. Bathe her
face and arms with it, force some
down her throat. But the water
was scarcely fit to drink. It was
old and stagnant and it stank of
rotted vegetation and it had the
taste of ancient dead things one

tried hard not to visualize.

He went over to the small pack
that belonged to Kitty and from
it he took the battered and fire-
blackened sauce pan that was the
one utensil they had brought
along.

Picking his way carefully down
the tiny island on which they’d
spent the night, he approached
the water’s edge and scouted
watchfully along it, seeking for a
place where the water might ap-
pear a bit less poisonous. Al-
though that, he knew, was fool-
ishness ; the water was the same
no matter where one looked.

It was bitter water in a bitter
swamp that had fought them for
seven days, that had sought to
trap them and had tried to hold
them back, that had bit and
stung them and tried to drive
them crazy, that had waited,
knowing there would come a slip
or some misstep or fall that
would put them at its mercy.

He shivered, thinking of it.
This was the first time, he real-
ized, that he had thought of it.
He had never thought of it be-
fore ; he had merely fought it. All
his energy had been directed to-
ward getting over that yard of
ground ahead, and after that, an-
other yard of ground.

Time had lost its meaning,
measured only in a man’s endur-
ance. Distance had come to have
no significance, for it stretched
on every side. There would al-

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

ways be that distance; there
would be no end to it.

It had been a murderous sev-
en days and the first two of them
he had known he could not make
it, that there was not another day
left in him. But each day there
had been another day left in him
and he’d made each day to its bit-
ter end.

Of the three of them, he
thought, he was the only one who
still was on his feet. And another
funny thing: He knew now that
he had another day left in him,
that he had many other days left
in him. He could keep on for-
ever, if it took forever. Now the
swamp could never stop him.
Somewhere in that terrible, tan-
gled greenness he had found a
hidden strength and had gotten
second wind.

Why should this be, he won-
dered. What was that inner
strength? From what source had
it come?

Was it, perhaps, because his
purpose had been strong ?

And once again he stood at the
window, wondering if there’d be
a butterfly this time or if the
butterfly were only a certain part
of childhood. But never question-
ing for a moment that the magic
still was there, that it had been
so strong and shining that thirty
years could not have tarnished it.

So he had gone outside and had
sat beneath the tree as he had sat
that day when he was a child,

3(S

with his hands held out, palms
up, and the strange card laid
across one palm. He could feel
the edge of magic and could
smell the new freshness of the
air, but it was not right, for
there were no yellow leaves fall-
ing down the sky,

TTE had waited for the frost
and when it came had gone
out again and sat beneath the
tree with the leaves falling
through the air like slow-paced
drops of rain. He had closed his
eyes and had smelled the autumn
air tainted with the faintest
touch of smoke, and had felt the
sunlight falling warm about him
and it was exactly as it had been
that day so long ago. The autumn
day of boyhood had not been lost ;
it was with him still.

He had sat there with his
hands held out and with the card
across one palm and nothing
happened. Then, as it had failed
to do that day of long ago, a leaf
came fluttering down and fell
atop the card. It lay there for an
instant, a perfect goldenness.

Then suddenly it was gone and
in its place atop the card was the
object that had been printed on
the card — a ball of some sort,
three inches in diameter, and
with prickly spikes sticking out
over it, like an outsize gooseber-
ry. Then it buzzed at him and he
could feel the buzzing spreading
through his body.

FANTASTIC

It seemed in that instant that
there Was something with him,
or that he was part of something
— some thinking, living, (per-
haps even loving) thing that
quivered somewhere very close
to him and yet very far away.
As if this thing, whatever it
might be, had reached out a fin-
ger and had touched him, for no
other purpose than to let him
know that it was there.

He crouched down to dip the
water with the battered, black-
ened pan from a pool that ap-
peared to be just a little cleaner
and a little clearer than it had
seemed elsewhere.

And there had been something
there, he thought. Something
that through the years he had be-
come acquainted with, but never
truly known. A gentle thing, for
it had dealt with him gently.
And a thing that had a purpose
and had driven him toward that
purpose, but kindly, as a kindly
teacher drives a student toward
a purpose that in the end turns
out to be the student’s own.

The little buzzing gooseberry
was the gateway to it, so long as
the gooseberry had been needed.
Although, he thought, such a
word as gateway was entirely
wrong, for there had been no
gateway in the sense that he had
ever seen this thing, or come
close to it or had a chance to find
out what it was. Only that it
was, that it lived and that it had

a mind and could communicate.

Not talk — communicate. And
toward the end, he recalled, the
communication had been excel-
lent, although the understanding
that should have gone with com-
munication had never quite come
clear.

Given time, he thought. But
there had been an interruption
and that was why he must get
back, as quickly as he could. For
it would not know why he had
left it. It would not understand.
It might think that he had died,
if it had a concept that would
encompass a condition such as
death. Or that he had deserted it.
Or that somehow it had failed.

He dipped the sauce pan full of
water and straightened, standing
in the great hush of the morning.

He remembered now. But why
had he not remembered sooner?
Why had it escaped him? How
had he forgotten?

From far away he heard it and
hearing it, felt the hope leap in
him. He waited tensely to hear it
once again, needing to hear it
that second time to know that it
was true.

It came again, faint, but car-
rying unmistakably in the morn-
ing air — the crowing of a rooster.

He swung around and ran back
to the camping site.

Eunning, he stumbled, and the
pan flew from his hand. He
scrabbled to his feet and left the
pan where it had fallen.

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

He rushed to Kitty and fell on
his knees beside her.

“Just a few more miles!” he
shouted. “I heard a rooster crow-
ing. The edge of the swamp can’t
be far away.”

He reached down and slid his
hands beneath her, lifted her,
cradling her, holding her tightly
against him.

She moaned and tossed.

“Easy, girl,” he said. “We’re
almost out of it.”

He struggled from his knees
and stood erect. He shifted her
body so that it rode the easier in
his arms.

“I’ll carry you,” he said. “I can
carry you all the way.”

* * *

I T was farther that he'd
thought. And the swamp was
worse that it had ever been— as
if, sensing that this stumbling,
stubborn creature might slip out
of its grasp, it had redoubled its
trickery and its viciousness in a
last attempt to seize and swallow
him.

He had left the little food
they’d had behind. He’d left ev-
erything behind. He had taken
only Kitty.

When she achieved a sort of
half consciousness and cried for
water, he stopped beside a pool,
carried water to her in his
cupped hands, bathed her face
and helped her drink, then went
on again.

Late in the afternoon the fever

broke and she regained full con-
sciousness.

“Where am I?” she asked,
staring at the green-blackness of
the swamp.

“Who are you?” she asked, and
he tried to tell her. She did not
remember him, or the swamp, or
Limbo. He spoke to her of Eric
and she did not remember Eric.

And that, he recalled, had
been the way it had been with
him. He had not remembered.
Only over hours and days had it
come back to him in snatches.

Was that the way it would be
with her? Had that been the way
it had been with Eric? Had there
been no self-sacrifice, no heroism
in what Eric did? Had it been a
mere, blind running from the pit
of horror in which he awoke to
find himself?

And if all of this were true,
whatever had been wrong with
him, whatever caused the fever
and forgetfulness, was then the
same as. had happened to Kitty
and to Eric.

Was it, he wondered, some in-
fection that he carried?

For if that were true, then it
was possible he had infected ev-
eryone in Limbo.

He went on into the afternoon
and his strength amazed him,
for he should not be this strong.

It was nerve, he knew, that
kept him going, the sheer excite-
ment of being almost free of this
vindictive swamp.

FANTASTIC

But the nerve would break, he
knew. He could not keep it up.
The nerve would break and the
excitement would grow dull and
dim and the strength would drain
from him. He’d then be an aged
man carrying an aged woman
through a swamp he had no right
to think he could face alone, let
alone assume the burden of an-
other human.

But the strength held out. He
could feel it flowing in him. Dusk
fell and the first faint stars came
out, but the going now was eas-
ier. It had been easier, he real-
ized, for the last hour or so.

“Put me down,” said Kitty. "I
can walk. There’s no need to car-
ry me.”

“Just a little while,” said Al-
den. “We are almost there.”

Now the ground was firmer and
he could tell by the rasp of it
against his trouser legs that he
was walking in a different kind
of grass — no longer the harsh,
coarse, knife-like grass that
grew in the swamp, but a softer,
gentle grass.

A hill loomed in the darkness
aQd he climbed it and now the'
ground was solid.

He reached the top of the hill
and stopped. He let Kitty down
and stood her on her feet.

The air was clean and sharp
and pure. The leaves of a nearby
tree rustled in a breeze and in the
east the sky was tinged with the
pearly light of a moon.

Back of them the swamp,
which they had beaten, and in
front of them the clean, solid
countryside that eventually
would defeat them. Although
eventually, Alden told himself,
sounded much too long. In a few
days, perhaps in a few hours,
they would be detected and run
down.

With an arm around Kitty’s
waist to hold her steady as she
walked, he went down the hill to
eventual defeat.

* » *

T he rattletrap pickup truck
stood in the moonlit farm-
yard. There were no lights in the
house that stood gaunt upon the
hilltop. The road from the farm-
yard ran down a long, steep hill
to join the main road a half mile
or so away.

There would be no ignition
key, of course, but one could
cross the wires, then shove the
truck until it started coasting
down the hill. Once it was going,
throw it into gear and the motor
would crank over and start up.

“Someone will catch us, Al-
den,” Kitty told him. “There is
no more certain way for someone
to find out about us. Stealing a
truck . . .”

“It’s only twenty miles,” said
Alden. “That’s what the signpost
said. And we can be there before
there is too much fuss.”

“But it would be safer walk-
ing and hiding.”

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

“There is no time,” he said.

For he remembered now. It
had all come back to him — ^the
machine that he had built in the
dining room. A machine that was
like a second body, that was like
a suit to wear. It was a two-way
schoolhouse, or maybe a two-way
laboratory, for when he was in-
side of it he learned of that other
life and it learned of him.

It had taken years to build it,
years to understand how to as-
semble the components had
those others, or that other, had
provided. All the components had
been small and there had been
thousands of them. He had held
out his hand and thought hard of
yellow leaves falling in the blue
haze of autumn air and there had
been another piece of that
strange machine put into his
hand.

And now it stood, untenant,
in that faded, dusky room and
they would be wondering what
had happened to him.

“Come on,” he said to Kitty,
sharply. “There is no use in wait-
ing.

“There might be a dog. There
might be a . . .”

“We will have to chance it.”

He ducked out of the clump of
trees and ran swiftly across the
moonlit barnyard to the truck.
He reached it and wrenched at
the hood and the hood would not
come up.

Kitty screamed, just once,

more a warning scream than
fright, and he spun around. The
shape stood not more than a/ doz-
en feet away, with the moonlight
glinting off its metal and the
Medic Disciplinary symbol en-
graved upon its chest.

Alden backed against the truck
and stood there, staring at the
robot knowing that the truck
had been no more than bait. And
thinking how well the medics
must know the human race to set
that sort of trap — knowing not
only the working of the human
body, but the human mind as
well.

Kitty said : “If you’d not been
slowed up. If you’d not carried

me . . .”

“It would have made no differ-
ence,” Alden told her. “They
probably had us spotted almost
from the first and were tracking
us.”

“Young man,” the robot said,
“you are entirely right. I have
been waiting for you. I must ad-
mit,” the robot said, “that I have
some admiration for you. You
are the only ones who ever
crossed the swamp. There were
some who tried, but they never
made it.”

S O this was how it ended, Al-
den told himself, with some
bitterness, but not as much, per-
haps, as he should have felt. For
there had been, he thought, noth-
ing but a feeble hope from the

FANTASTIC

first beginning. He had been
walking toward defeat, he knew,
with every step he’d taken — and
into a hopelessness that even he
admitted.

If only he had been able to
reach the house in Willow Bend,
that much he had hoped for, that
much would have satisfied him.
To reach it and let those others
know he had not deserted.

“So what happens now?’’ he
asked the robot. “Is it back to
Limbo?’’

The robot never had a chance
to answer. There was a sudden
rush of running feet, pounding
across the farmyard.

The robot swung around and
there was something streaking
in the moonlight that the robot
tried to duck, but couldn’t.

Alden sprang in a low and
powerful dive, aiming for the ro-
bot’s knees. His shoulder struck
on metal and the flying rock
clanged against the breastplate
of the metal man. Alden felt the
robot, already throvm off balance
by the rock, topple at the impact
of his shoulder.

The robot crashed heavily to
the earth and Alden, sprawling
on the ground, fought upright to
his feet.

“Kitty!” he shouted.

But Kitty, he saw, was busy.

She was kneeling beside the
fallen robot, who was struggling
to get up and in her hand she
held the thrown rock, with her

hand raised above the robot’s
skull. The rock came down and
the skull rang like a bell — and
rang again and yet again.

The robot ceased its struggling
and lay still, but Kitty kept on
pounding at the skull.

"Kitty, that’s enough,” said
another voice.

Alden turned to face the voice.

“Eric !” he cried. “But we left
you back there.”

“I know,” said Eric. “You
thought I had run back to Limbo.
I found where you had tracked
me.

“But you are here. You threw
the rock.”

Eric shrugged. “I got to be my-
self again. At first I didn’t know
where I was or who I was or any-
thing at all. And then I remem-
bered all of it. I had to make a
choice then. There really wasn’t
any choice. There was nothing
back in Limbo. I tried to catch
up with you, but you moved too
fast.”

“I killed him,” Kitty an-
nounced, defiantly. “I don’t care.
I meant to kill him.”

“Not killed,” said Eric.
“There’ll be others coming soon.
He can be repaired.”

“Give me a hand with the hood
on this truck,” said Alden. “We
have to get out of here.”

» *

E ric parked the rattletrap
back of the house and Alden
got out.

PHYSICIAN TO THE UNIVERSE

“Come alonsr now,” he said.

The back door was unlocked,
just as he had left it. He went
into the kitchen and switched on
the ceiling light.

Through the door that opened
into the dining room, he could
see the shadowy framework of
the structure he had built.

“We can’t stay here too long,”
said Eric. “They know we have
the truck. More than likely they’ll
guess where we were headed.”

Alden did not answer. For
there was no answer. There was
no place they could go.

Wherever they might go, they
would be hunted do-wn, for no one
could be allowed to flaunt the
medic statutes and defy the med-
ic justice. There was no one in
the world who would dare to help
them.

He had run from Limbo to
reach this place — although he
had not knovra at the time what
he was running to. It was not
Limbo he had run from; rather,
he had run to reach the machine
that stood in the dining room
just beyond this kitchen.

He went into the room and
snapped on the light and the
strange mechanism stood glitter-
ing in the center of the room.

It was a man-size cage and
there was just room for him to
stand inside of it. And he must
let them know that he was back
again.

He stepped into the space that

had been meant to hold him and
the outer framework and its
mysterious attachments seemed
to fold themselves about him.

He stood in the proper place
and shut his eyes and thought of
falling yellow leaves. He made
himself into the boy again who
had sat beneath the tree and it
was not his mind, but the little
boy mind that sensed the golden-
ness and blue, that smelled the
wine of autumn air and the
warmth of autumn sun.

He wrapped himself in autumn
and the long ago and he waited
for the answer, but there was no
answer.

He waited and the goldenness
slid from him and the air was no
longer wine-like and there was no
warm sunlight, but a biting wind
that blew off some black sea of
utter nothingness.

He knew — he knew and yet
he’d not admit it. He stood stub-
bornly and wan, with his feet still
in the proper place and waited.

But even stubborness worn
thin and he knew that they were
gone and that there was no use
of waiting, for they would not
be back. Slowly he turned and
walked out of the cage.

He had been away too long.

As he stepped out of the cage,
he saw the vial upon the floor and
stooped to pick it up. He had
supped from it, he remembered,
that day (how long ago?) when
he had stepped back into the

FANTASTIC

room after long hours in the
cage.

They had materialized it for
him and they’d told him he
should drink it and he could re-
member the bitter taste it had
left upon his tongue.

Kitty and Eric were standing
in the doorway, staring at him,
and he looked up from the vial
and stared in their direction.

“Alden,” Kitty asked, “what
has .happened to you?”

He shook his head at her. “It’s
all right,’’ he told her. “Noth-
ing’s happened. They just aren’t
there, is all.’’

“Something happened,” she
said, "You look younger by twen-
ty years or more.”

H e let the vial fall from his
hand. He lifted his hands in
front of him and in the light from
overhead, he saw that the wrin-
kles in the skin had disappeared.
They were stronger, firmer
hands. They were younger hands.

“It’s your face,” Kitty said.
“It’s all filled out. The crow’s
feet all are gone.”

He rubbed his palm along his
jaw and it seemed to him that
the bone was less pronounced,
that the flesh had grown out to
pad it.

“The fever,” he said. “That
was it — the fever.”

For he remembered dimly.
Not remembered, maybe, for
perhaps he had never known.

But he was knowing now. That
was the way it had always
worked. Not as if he’d learned a
thing, but as if he’d remembered
it. They put a thing into his
mind and left it planted there
and it unfolded then and crept
upon him slowly.

And now he knew.

The cage was not a teacher. It
was a device they had used to
study man, to learn about his
body and his metabolism and all
the rest of it.

And then when they had known
all there need be known, they had
written the prescription and giv-
en it to him.

Young man, the robot in the
barnyard had said to him. But
he had not noticed. Young man,
but he had too many other things
to think about to notice those
two words.

But the robot had been wrong.

For it was not only young.

Not young alone — not young
for the sake of being young, but
young because there was cours-
ing in his body a strange alien
virus, or whatever it might be,
that had set his body right, that
had tuned it up again, that had
given it the power to replace old
and aging tissue with new.

Doctors to the universe, he
thought, that is what they were.
Mechanics sent out to tinker up
and renovate and put in shape
the protoplasmic machinery that
was running old and rusty.

FANTASTIC

“The fever?” Eric asked him.

"Yes,” saidi^Alden. “And thank
God, it’s contagious. You both
caught it from me.”

He looked closely at them and
there was no sign of it as yet,
although Eric, it seemed, had be-
gun to change. And Kitty, he
thought, when it starts to work
on her, how beautiful she’ll be!
Beautiful because she had never
lost a certain part of beauty that
still showed through the age.

And all the people here in Wil-
low Bend — they, too, had been
exposed, as had the people who
were condemned to Limbo. And
perhaps the judge as well, the
high and mighty face that had
loomed so high above him. In a
little while the fever and the
healthy youthfulness would seep
across the world.

“We can’t stay here,” said
Eric. “The medics will be com-
ing.”

Alden shook his head. “We
don’t need to run,” he said.
“They can’t hurt us now.”

For the medic rule was ended.
There was now no need of med-
ics, no need of little leagues, no
need of health programs.

It would take a while, of
course, for the people to realize
what had happened to them, but
the day would come when they
would know for sure and then the
medics could be broken down for
scrap or used for other work.

He felt stronger than he’d ever
felt. Strong enough, if need be, to
walk back across the swamp to
Limbo.

“We’d not got out of Limbo,”
Kitty told him, “if it hadn’t
been for you. You were just crazy
enough to supply the guts we
needed.”

“Please remember that,” said
Alden, “in a few more days,
when you are young again.”

THE END

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A QUESTION OF

By J. G. BALLARD

Illustrator ADKINS

Somewhere in the festering blackness of the Amazon
jungle the Moonship had crashed. And the only ones who
might know the truth of the pilot’s fate were a
white witch doctor and his tribe of Indian worshippers.

A ll day they had moved stead-
ily upstream, occasionally
pausing to raise the propel-
ler and cut away the knots of
weed, and by 3 o’clock had cov-
ered some sevenyt-five miles.
Fifty yards away, on either side
of the patrol launch, the high
walls of the jungle river rose
over the water, the unbroken
massif of the mato grosso which
swept across the Amazonas from
Campos Buros to the delta of the
Orinoco. Despite their progress

— they had set off from the tele-
graph sation at Tres Buritis at 7
o’clock that morning — the river
showed no inclination to narrow
or alter its volume. Sombre and
unchanging, the forest followed
its course, the aerial canopy
shutting off the sunlight and
cloaking the water along the
banks with a black velvet sheen.
Now and then the channel would
widen into a flat expanse of what
appeared to be stationary water,
the slow oily swells which dis-

turbed its surface transforminsf
it into a huge sluggish mirror of
the distant, enigmatic sky, the
islands of rotten balsa logs re-
fracted by the layers of haze like
the drifting archipelagoes of a
dream. Then the channel would
narrow again and the cooling
jungle darkness enveloped the
launch.

Although for the first few
hours Connolly had joined Cap-
tain Pereira at the rail, he had
become bored with the endless
green banks of the forest sliding
past them, and since noon had
remained in the cabin, pretend-
ing to study the trajectory maps.
The time might pass more slow-
ly there, but at least it was cooler
and less depressing. The fan
hummed and pivoted, and the
clicking of the cutwater and the
whispering plant of the current
past the gliding hull soothed the
slight headache induced by the
tepid beer he and Pereira had
shared after lunch.

T his first encounter with the
jungle had disappointed Con-
nolly. His previous experience
had been confined to the Dredg-
ing Project at Lake Maracaibo,
where the only forests consisted
of the abandoned oil rigs built
out into the water. Their rust-
ing hulks, and the huge drag-
lines and pontoons of the dredg-
ing teams, were fauna of a man-

made species. In the Amazonian
jungle he had expected to see the
full variety of nature in its rich-
est and most colorful outpouring,
but instead it was nothing more
than a moribund tree-level
swamp, unweeded and overgrown,
the whole thing more dead than
alive, an example of bad hus-
bandry on a continental scale.
The margins of the river were
rarely well defined ; except where
enough rotting trunks had gath-
ered to form a firm parapet, there
were no formal banks, and the
shallows ran off among the un-
dergrowth for a hundred yards,
irrigating huge areas of vegeta-
tion that were already drowning
in moisture.

Connolly had tried to convey
his disenchantment to Pereira,
who now sat under the awning on
the deck, placidly smoking a
cheroot, partly to repay the Cap-
tain for his polite contempt for
Connolly and everything his mis-
sion implied. Like all the officers
of the Native Protection Missions
whom Connolly had met, first in
Venezuela and now in Brazil,
Pereira maintained a proprietary
outlook towards the jungle and
its mystique, which would not be
breached by any number of
fresh-faced investigators in their
crisp drill uniforms. Captain Per-
eira had not been impressed by
the UN flashes on Connolly’s
shoulders .with their orbital
monogram, nor by the high-level

FANTASTIC

request for assistance cabled to
the Mission three weeks earlier
from Brasilia. To Pereira, obvi-
ously, the office suites in the
white towers at the capital were
as far away as New York, Lon-
don or Babylon.

S UPERFICIALLY, the Captain
had been helpful enough, su-
pervising the crew as they
stowed Connolly’s monitoring
equipment aboard, checking his
Smith & Wesson and exchanging
a pair of defective mosquito
boots. As long as Connolly had
wanted to, he had conversed
away amiably, pointing out this
and that feature of the land-
scape, identifying an unusual
bird or lizard on an overhead
bough.

But his indifference to the real
object of the mission — he had
given a barely perceptible nod
when Connolly described it —
soon became obvious. It was this
neutrality which irked Connolly,
implying that Pereira spent all
his time ferrying UN investiga-
tors up and down the rivers after
their confounded, lost space cap-
sule like so many tourists in
search of some non-existent El
Dorado. Above all there was the
suggestion that Connolly and the
hundreds of other investigators
deployed around the continent
were being too persistent. When
all was said and done, Pereira im-
plied, five years had elapsed since

the returning lunar spacecraft,
the Goliath 7, had plummeted
into the South American land
mass, and to prolong the search
indefinitely was simply bad form,
even, perhaps, necrophilic. There
was not the faintest chance of the
pilot still being alive, so he should
be decently forgotten, given a
statue outside a railway station
or airport car park and left to
the pigeons.

Connolly would have been glad
to explain the reasons for the in-
definite duration of the search,
the overwhelming moral reasons,
apart from the political and tech-
nical ones. He would have liked
to point out that the lost astro-
naut, Colonel Francis Spender,
by accepting the immense risks of
the flight to and from the Moon,
was owed the absolute discharge
of any assistance that could be
given him. He would have liked
to remind Pereira that the suc-
cessful landing on the Moon, aft-
er some half-dozen fatal attempts
— at least three of the luckless
pilots were still orbiting the
Moon in their dead ships — was
the culmination of an age-old am-
bition with profound psychologi-
cal implications for mankind, and
that the failure to find the astro-
naut after his return might in-
duce unassagueable feelings of
guilt and inadequacy. (If the sea
was an unconscious symbol of
the unconscious, was space per-
haps an image of total unfet-

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

tered time, and the inability to
penetrate it a tragic exile to one
of the limbos of eternity, a sym-
bolic death in life?)

But Captain Pereira was not
interested. Calmly inhaling the
scented aroma of his cheroot, he
sat imperturbably at the rail,
surveying the fetid swamps that
moved past them.

S HORTLY before noon, when
they had covered some 40
miles, Connolly pointed to the
remains of a bamboo landing
stage elevated on high poles above
the bank. A threadbare rope
bridge trailed off among the man-
groves, and through an embra-
sure in the forest they could see
a small clearing where a clutter
of abandoned adobe huts dis-
solved like refuse heaps in the
sunlight.

“Is this one of their camps?"
Pereira shook his head. “The
Espirro tribe, closely related to
the Nambikwaras. Three years
ago one of them carried influenza
back from the telegraph station,
an epidemic broke out, turned
into a form of pulmonary edema,
within forty-eight hours three
hundred Indians had died. The
whole group disintegrated, only
about fifteen of the men and their
families are still alive. A great
tragedy.”

They moved forward to the
bridge and stood beside the tall
Negro helmsman as the two other

members of the crew began to
shackle sections of fine wire
mesh into a cage over the deck.
Pereira raised his binoculars and
scanned the river ahead.

“Since the Espirros vacated
the area the Nambas have begun
to forage down this far. We won't
see any of them, but it’s as well
to be on the safe side.”

“Do you mean they’re hostile?”
Connolly asked.

“Not in a conscious sense. But
the various groups which com-
prise the Nambikwaras are per-
manently feuding with each oth-
er, and this far from the settle-
ment we might easily be involved
in an opportunist attack. Once we
get to the settlement we’ll be all
right — there’s a sort of precari-
ous equilibrium there. But even
so, have your wits about you. As
you’ll see, they’re as nervous as
birds.”

“How does Ryker manage to
keep out of their way? Hasn’t
he been here for years?”

“About twelve.” Pereira sat
down on the gunwhale and eased
his peaked cap off his forehead.
“Ryker is something of a special
case. Temperamentally he’s rath-
er explosive — I meant to warn
you to handle him carefully, he
might easily whip up an incident
— but he seems to have maneuv-
ered himself into a position of
authority with the tribe. In some
ways he’s become an umpire, ar-
bitrating in their various feuds.

FANTASTIC

How he does it I haven’t discov-
ered yet; it’s quite uncharacter-
istic of the Indians to regard a
white man in that way. However,
he’s useful to us, we might even-
tually set up a mission here.
Though that’s next to impossible
— ^we tried it once and the Indians
just moved 500 miles away.”

C ONNOLLY looked back at the
derelict landing stage as it
disappeared around a bend, bare-
ly distinguishable from the jun-
gle, which was as dilapidated as
this sole mournful artifact.

“What on earth made Ryker
come out here?” He had heard
something in Brasilia of this
strange figure, sometime journal-
ist and man of action, the self-
proclaimed world citizen who at
the age of forty-two, after a life
spent venting his spleen on civil-
ization and its gimcrack gods,
had suddenly disappeared into
the Amazonas and taken up resi-
dence with one of the aborginial
tribes. Most latter-day Gauguins
were absconding con-men or neu-
rotics, but Ryker seemed to be a
genuine character in his own
right, the last of a race of true
individualists retreating before
the barbed-wire fences and regi-
mentation of 20th century life.
But hre chosen paradise seemed
pretty scruffy and degenerate,
Connolly reflected, when one saw
it at close quarters. However, as
long as the man could organize

the Indians into a few search
parties he would serve his pur-
pose. “I can’t understand why
Ryker should pick the Amazon
basin. The South Pacific, yes, but
from all I’ve heard — and you’ve
confirmed just now — the Indians
appear to be a pretty diseased
and miserable lot, hardly the no-
ble savage.”

Captain Pereira shrugged,
looking away across the oily wa-
ter, his plump sallow face mot-
tled by the lace-like shadow of
the wire netting. He belched dis-
cretely to himself, and then ad-
justed his holster belt. “I don’t
know the South Pacific, but I
should guess it’s also been over-
sentimentalized. Ryker didn’t
come here for a scenic tour. I
suppose the Indians are diseased
and, yes, reasonably miserable.
Within fifty years they’ll proba-
bly have died out. But for the
time being they do represent a
certain form of untamed, natural
existence, which after all made
us what we are. The hazards fac-
ing them are immense, and they
survive.” He gave Connolly a sly
smile. “But you must argue it
out with Ryker.”

They lapsed into silence and
sat by the rail, watching the riv-
er unfurl itself. Exhausted and
collapsing, the great trees crowd-
ed the banks, the dying expiring
among the living, jostling each
other aside as if for a last de-
spairing assault on the patrol

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

boat and its passengers. For the
next half an hour, until they
opened their lunch packs, Con-
nolly searched the tree-tops for
the giant bifurcated parachute
which should have carried the
capsule to earth. Virtually im-
permeable to the atmosphere, it
would still be visible, spreadea-
gled like an enormous bird over
the canopy of leaves. Then, after
drinking a can of Pereira’s beer,
he excused himself and went
down to the cabin.

T he two steel cases containing
the monitoring equipment had
been stowed under the chart ta:;_
ble, and he pulled them out and
checked that the moisture-proof
seals were still intact. The chanc-
es of making visual contact with
the capsule were infinitessimal,
but as long as it was intact it
would continue to transmit both
a sonar and radio beacon, admit-
tedly over little more than twen-
ty miles, but sufficient to identi-
fy its whereabouts to anyone in
the immediate neighborhood.
However, the entire northern
half of the South Americas had
been covered by successive aerial
sweeps, and it seemed unlikely
that the beacons were still oper-
ating. The disappearance of the
capsule argued that it had sus-
tained at least minor damage,
and by now the batteries would
have been corroded by the humid
air.

Recently certain of the UN
Space Department agencies had
begun to circulate the unofficial
view that Colonel Spender had
failed to select the correct atti-
tude for re-entry and that the
capsule had been vaporized on
its final descent, but Connolly
guessed that this was merely an
attempt to pacify world opinion
and prepare the way for the re-
sumption of the space program.
Not only the Lake Maracaibo
Dredging Project, but his own
presence on the patrol boat, in-
dicated that the Department still
believed Colonel Spender to be
alive, or at least to have survived
the landing. His final re-entry
orbit should have brought him
down into the landing zone 500
miles to the east of Trinidad,
but the last radio contact before
the ionization layers around the
capsule severed transmission in-
dicated that he had under-shot
his trajectory and come down
somewhere on the South Ameri-
can land-mass along a line link-
ing Lake Maracaibo with Brasil-
ia.

Footsteps sounded down the
companionway, and Captain Per-
eira lowered himself into the
cabin. He tossed his hat onto the
chart table and sat with his back
to the fan, letting the air blow
across his fading hair, carrying
across to Connolly a sweet un-
savory odor of garlic and cheap
pomade.

FANTASTIC

“You’re a sensible man. Lieu-
tenant. Anyone who stays up on
deck is crazy. However,” — he in-
dicated Connolly’s pallid face and
hands, a memento of a long win-
ter in New York — “in a way it’s
a pity you couldn’t have put in
some sunbathing. That metropol-
itan pallor will be quite a curi-
osity to the Indians.” He smiled
agreeably, showing the yellowing
teeth which made his olive com-
plexion even darker. “You may
well be the first white man in the
literal sense that the Indians
have seen.”

“What about Ryker? Isn’t he
white?”

“Black as a berry now. Almost
indistinguishable from the Indi-
ans, apart from being 7 feet tall.”
He pulled over a collection of
cardboard boxes at the far end of
the seat and began to rumage
through them. Inside was a col-
lection of miscellaneous oddments
— balls of thread and raw cotton,
lumps of wax and resin, urucu
paste, tobacco and sead-beads.
“These ought to assure them of
your good intentions.”

C ONNOLLY watched as he
fastened the boxes together.
“How many search parties w’ill
they buy? Are you sure you
brought enough? I have a fifty-
dollar allocation for gifts.”

“Good,”. Pereira said matter-of
factly. “We'll get some more beer.
Don’t •worry, you can’t buy these

people. Lieutenant. You have to
rely on their good-will; this rub-
bish will put them in the right
frame of mind to talk.”

Connolly smiled dourly. “I’m
more keen on getting them off
their hunkers and out into the
bush. How are you going to or-
ganize the search parties?”

“They’ve already taken place.”

“What?” Connolly sat forward.
“How did that happen ? But they
should have waited” — he glanced
at the hea'vy monitoring equip-
ment — “they can’t have known
what—”

Pereira silenced him with a
raised hand. “My dear Lieuten-
ant. Relax, I was speaking figu-
ratively. Can’t you understand,
these people are nomadic, they
spend all their lives continually
on the move. They must have
covered every square foot of this
forest a hundred times in the
past five years. There’s no need
to send them out again. Your
only hope is that they may have
seen something and then per-
suade them to talk.”

Connolly considered this, as
Pereira unwrapped another par-
cel. “All right, but I may want
to do a few patrols. I can’t just
sit around for three days.”

“Naturally. Don’t worry. Lieu-
tenant. If your astronaut came
down anywhere within 500 miles
of here they’ll know about it.” He
unwrapped the parcel and re-
moved a small teak cabinet. The

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

front panel was slotted, and lifted
to reveal the face of a large or-
molu table clock, its gothic hands
and numerals below a gilded bell-
dome. Captain Pereira compared
its time with his wrist-watch.
“Good. Running perfectly, it
hasn’t lost a second in forty-
eight hours. This should put us
in Ryker’s good books.”

Connolly shook his head. “Why
on earth does he want a clock?
I thought the man had turned
his back on such things.”

Pereira packed the tooled metal
face away. “Ah, well, whenever
we escape from anything we al-
ways carry a memento of it with
us. Ryker collects clocks; this is
the third I’ve bought for him.
God knows what he does with
them.”

T he launch had changed
course, and was moving in a
wide circle across the river, the
current whispering in a tender
rippling murmur across the hull.
They made their way up onto the
deck, where the helmsman was
unshackling several sections of
the wire mesh in order to give
himself an uninterrupted view of
the bows. The two sailors climbed
through the aperture and took
up their positions fore and aft,
boat-hooks at the ready.

They had entered a large bow-
shaped extension of the river,
where the current had overflowed
the bank and produced a series of

low-lying mud-flats. Some two or
three hundred yards wide, the
water seemed to be almost mo-
tionless, seeping away through
the trees which defined its mar-
gins so that the exit and inlet
of the river were barely percepti-
ble. At the inner bend of the
bow, on the only firm ground, a
small cantonment of huts had
been built on a series of wooden
palisades jutting out over the
water. A narrow promontory of
forest reached to either side of
the cantonment, but a small area
behind it had been cleared to
form an open campong. On its
far side were a number of wattle
storage huts, a few dilapidated
shacks and hovels of dried palm.

The entire area seemed desert-
ed, but as they approached, the
cutwater throwing up a fine
plume of white spray across the
glassy swells, a few Indians ap-
peared in the shadows below the
creepers trailing over the jetty,
watching them stonily. Connolly
had expceted to see a group of
tall broad-shouldered warriors
with white markings notched
across their arms and cheeks,
but these Indians were puny and
degenerate, their pinched faces
lowered beneath their squat bony
skulls. They seemed undernour-
ished and depressed, eyeing the
visitors with a soi’t of sullen
watchfulness like pariah dogs
from the gutter.

Pereira was shielding his eyes

FANTASTIC

from the sun, across whose in-
clining path they were now mov-
ing, searching the ramshackle
bungalow built of woven rattan
at the far end of the jetty.

“No signs of Ryker yet. He’s
probably asleep or drunk.” He
noticed Connolly’s distasteful
frown. “Not much of a place, I’m
afraid.”

A S they moved towards the jet-
ty, the wash from the launch
slapping at the greasy bamboo
poles and throwing a gust of foul
air into their faces, Connolly
looked back across the open disc
of water, into which the curving
wake of the launch was dissolving
in a final summary of their long
voyage up-river to the derelict
settlement, fading into the slack
brown water like a last tenuous
thread linking him with the or-
der and sanity of civilization. A
strange atmosphere of emptiness
hung over this inland lagoon, a
flat pall of dead air that in a
curious way was as menacing as
any overt signs of hostility, as if
the crudity and violence of all
the Amazonian jungles met here
in a momentary balance which
some untoward movement of his
own might upset, unleashing ap-
palling forces. Away in the dis-
tance, down-shore, the great trees
leaned like corpses into the glazed
air, and the haze over the water
embalmed the jungle and the late
afternoon in a timeless stillness.

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

They bumped against the jet-
ty, rocking lightly into the pali-
sade of poles and dislodging a
couple of water-logged outrig-
gers lashed together. The helms-
man reversed the engine, waiting
for the sailors to secure the lines.
None of the Indians had come
forward to assist them. Connolly
caught a glimpse of one old sim-
ian face regarding him with a
rheumy eye, riddled teeth ner-
vously fingering a pouch-like
lower lip.

He turned to Pereira, glad
that the Captain would be inter-
ceding between himself and the
Indians. “Captain, I should have
asked before, but — are these In-
dians cannibalistic?”

Pereira shook his head, steady-
ing himself against a staunchion.
“Not at all. Don’t worry about
that, they’d have been extinct
years ago if they were.”

“Not even — white men?” For
some reason Connolly found him-
self placing a peculiarly indeli-
cate emphasis uiwn the word
’white’.

Pereira laughed, straightening
his uniform jacket. “For God’s
sake. Lieutenant, no. Are you
worrying that your astronaut
might have been eaten by them?”

“I suppose it’s a possibility.”

“I assure you, there have
been no recorded cases. As a mat-
ter of inetrest, it’s a rare prac-
tice on this continent. Much more
typical of Africa — and Europe,”

he added with sly humor. Pausing
to smile at Connolly, he said qui-
etly. “Don’t despise the Indians,
Lieutenant. However diseased
and dirty they may be, at least
they are in equilibrium with their
environment. And with them-
selves. You’ll find no Christopher
Columbuses or Colonel Spenders
here, but no Belsens either. Per-
haps one is as much a symptom
of unease as the other?’’

^HEY had begun to drift down
the jetty, over-running one of
the outriggers, whose bow
creaked and disappeared under
the stern of the launch, and Per-
eira shouted at the helmsman:
“Ahead, Sancho ! More ahead !
Damn Ryker, where is the man?’’

Churning out a niagara of
boiling brown water, the launch
moved forward, driving its shoul-
der into the bamboo supports,
and the entire jetty sprung light-
ly under the impact. As the motor
was cut and the lines finally se-
cured, Connolly looked up at the
jetty above his head.

Scowling down at him, an ex-
pression of bilious irritability on
his heavy-jawed face, was a tall
bare-chested man wearing a pair
of frayed cotton shorts and a
sleeve-less waistcoat of pleated
raffia, his dark eyes almost hid-
den by a wide-brimmed straw
hat. The heavy muscles of his ex-
posed chest and arms were the
color of tropical teak, and the

white scars on his lips and the
fading traces of the heat ulcers
which studded his shin bones
provided the only lighter color-
ing. Standing there, arms akim-
bo with a sort of jaunty arro-
gance, he seemed to represent to
Connolly that quality of untamed
energy which he had so far found
so conspicuously missing from
the forest.

Completing his scrutiny of
Connolly, the big man bellowed;
“Pereira, for God’s sake, what do
you think you’re doing? That’s
my bloody outrigger you’ve just
run down ! Tell that steersman of
your’s to get the cataracts out of
his eyes or I’ll put a bullet
through his backside!’’

Grinning good humoredly,
Pereira pulled himself up on to
the jetty. “My dear Ryker, con-
tain yourself. Remember your
blood-pressure.” He peered down
at the water-logged hulk of the
derelict canoe which was now
ejecting itself slowly from the
river. “Anyway, what good is a
canoe to you, you’re not going
anywhere.”

G rudgingly, Ryker shook

Pereira’s hand. “That’s what
you like to think. Captain. You
and your confounded Mission,
you want me to do all the work.
Next time you may find I’ve gone
a thousand miles up-river. And
taken the Nambas with me.”
“What an epic prospect, Ryker.

FANTASTIC

You’ll need a Homer to celebrate
it.” Pereira turned and gestured
Connolly on to the jetty. The In-
dians were still hanging about
listlessly, like guilty intruders.

Ryker eyed Connolly’s uniform
suspiciously. "Who’s this? An-
other so-called anthropologist,
sniffing about for smut? I
warned you last time, I will

not have any more of those.”

"Xo, Ryker. Can’t you recog-
nize the uniform? Let me intro-
duce Lieutenant Connolly, of that
brotherhood of latter-day saints,
by whose courtesy and generosi-
ty we live in peace together — the
United Nations.”

“What? Don’t tell me they’ve
got a mandate here now? God

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

above, I suppose he’ll bore my
head off about cereal/protein ra-
tios!” His ironic groan revealed
a concealed reserve of acid hu-
mor.

“Relax. The Lieutenant is
very charming and polite. He
works for the Space Department,
Reclamation Division. You know,
searching for lost aircraft and
the like. There’s a chance you
may be able to help him.” Pereira
winked at Connolly and steered
him forward. “Lieutenant, the
Rajah Ryker.”

“I doubt it,” Ryker said dourly.
They shook hands, the corded
muscles of Ryker’s fingers like a
trap. Despite his thick-necked
stoop, Ryker was a good six to
ten inches taller than Connolly.
For a moment he held on to Con-
nolly’s hand, a slight trace of
wariness revealed below his mask
of bad temper. “When did this
plane come down?” he asked.
Connolly guessed that he was al-
ready thinking of a profitable sal-
vage operation.

“Some time ago,” Pereira said
mildly. He picked up the parcel
containing the cabinet clock and
began to stroll after Ryker to-
wards the bungalow at the . end
of the jetty. A low-eaved dwell-
ing of woven rattan, its single
room was surrounded on all sides
by a veranda, the overhanging
roof shading it from the sunlight.
Creepers trailed across from the
surrounding foliage, involving it

in the background of palms and
fronds, so that the house seemed
a momentary formalization of the
jungle.

“But the Indians might have
heard something about it,” Per-
eira went on. “Five years ago, as
a matter of fact.”

R yker snorted. “My God,
you’ve got a hope.” They
went up the stei>s on to the veran-
da, where a slim-shouldered In-
dian youth, his eyes like moist
marbles, was watching from the
shadows. With a snap of irrita-
tion, Ryker cupped his hand
around the youth’s pate and pro-
pelled him with a backward
swing down the steps. Sprawling
on his knees, the youth picked
himself up, eyes still fixed on
Connolly, then emitted what
sounded like a high-pitched nasal
hoot, compounded partly of fear
and partly of excitement. Con-
nolly looked back from the door-
way, and noticed that several
other Indians had stepped onto
the pier and were watching him
with the same expression of rapt
curiosity.

Pereira patted Connolly's
shoulder. “I told you they’d be
impressed. Did you see that, Ry-
ker?”

Ryker nodded curtly, as they
entered his Hying room pulled off
his straw hat and tossed it on to
a couch under the window. The
room was dingy and cheerless.

FANTASTIC

Crude bamboo shelves were
strung around the walls, orna-
mented with a few primitive carv-
ings of ivory and bamboo. A cou-
ple of rocking chairs and a card-
table were in the center of the
room, dwarfed by an immense
Victorian mahogany dresser
standing against the rear wall.
With its castellated mirrors and
ornamental pediments it looked
like an altar-piece stolen from a
cathedral. At first glance it ap-
peared to be leaning to one side,
but then Connolly saw that its
rear legs had been carefully
raised from the tilting floor with
a number of small wedges. In
the center of the dresser, its mul-
tiple reflections receding to in-
finity in a pair of small wing
mirrors, was a cheap three-dol-
lar alarm clock, ticking away
loudly. An over-and-under Win-
chester shotgun leaned against
the wall beside it.

Gesturing Pereira and Con-
nolly into the chairs, Ryker
raised . the blind over the rear
window. Outside was the com-
pound, the circle of huts around
its perimeter. A few Indians
squatted in the shadows, spears
upright between their knees.

Connolly watched Ryker mov-
ing about in front of him, aware
that the man’s earlier impatience
had given away to a faint but no-
ticeable edginess. Ryker glanced
irritably through the window,
apparently annoyed to see the

gradual gathering of the Indians
before their huts.

There was a sweetly unsavory
smell in the room, and over his
shoulder Connolly saw that the
card-table was loaded with a
large bale of miniature animal
skins, those of a vole or some
other forest rodent. A half-heart-
ed attempt had been made to
trim the skins, and tags of clot-
ted blood clung to their margins.

Ryker jerked the table with his
foot. “Well, here you are,” he
said to Pereira. “Twelve dozen.
They took a hell of a lot of get-
ting, I can tell you. You’ve
brought the clock?”

■pEREIRA nodded, still holding
the parcel in his lap. He
gazed distastefully at the dank
scruffy skins. “Have you got
some rats in there, Ryker? These
don’t look much good. Perhaps
we should check through them
outside. . . .”

“Dammit, Pereira, don’t be a
fool!” Ryker snapped. “They’re
as good as you’ll get. I had to
trim half the skins myself. Let’s
have a look at the clock.”

“Wait a minute.” The Cap-
tain’s jovial, easy-going manner
had stiffened. Making the most
of his temporary advantage, he
reached out and touched one of
the skins gingerly, shaking his
head. “Pugh. ... Do you know
how much I paid for this clock,
Ryker? Seventy-five dollars.

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

That’s your credit for three
years. I’m not so sure. And
you’re not very helpful, you know.
Now about this aircraft that may
have come down — ”

Eyker snapped his fingers.
“Forget it. Nothing did. The
Nambas tell me everything.” He
turned to Connolly. “You can
take it from me there’s no trace
of an aircraft around here. Any
rescue mission would be wasting
their time.”

Pereira watched Ryker criti-
cally. “As a matter of fact it
wasn’t an aircraft.” He tapped
Connolly’s shoulder flash. “It was
a rocket capsule — with a man on
board. A very important and val-
uable man. None other than the
Moon pilot, Colonel Francis
Spender.”

“Well. . . .” Eyebrows raised
in mock surprise, Ryker ambled
to the window, stared out at a
group of Indians who had ad-
vanced half-way across the com-
pound. “My God, what next! The
Moon pilot. Do they really think
he’s around here? But what a
place to roost.” He leaned out of
the window and bellowed at the
Indians, who retreated a few
paces and then held their ground.
“Damn fools,” he muttered, “this
isn’t a zoo.”

Pereira handed him the parcel,
watching the Indians. There were
more than fifty around the com-
pound now, squatting in their
doorways, a few of the younger

men honing their spears. “They
are remarkably curious,” he said
to Ryker, who had taken the par-
cel over to the dresser and was
unwrapping it carefully. "Surely
they’ve seen a pale-skinned man
before?”

“They’ve nothing better to do.”
Ryker lifted the clock out of the
cabinet with his big hands, with
great care placed it beside the
alarm clock, the almost inaudible
motion of its pendulum lost in
the metallic chatter of the latter’s
escapement. For a moment he
gazed at the ornamental hands
and numerals. Then he picked up
the alarm clock and with an al-
most valedictory pat, like an of-
ficer dismissing a faithful if stu-
pid minion, locked it away in the
cupboard below. His former
buoyancy returning, he gave
Pereira a playful slap on the
shoulder. “Captain, if you want
any more rat-skins just give me
a shout!”

B acking away, Pereira’s heel
touched one of Connolly’s
feet, distracting him from a
problem he had been puzzling
over since their entry into the
hut. Like a concealed clue in a
detective story, he was sure that
he had noticed something of sig-
nificance, but was unable to
identify it.

“We won’t worry about the
skins,” Pereira said. “What we’ll
do with your assistance, Ryker, is

FANTASTIC

to hold a little parley with the
chiefs, see whether they remem-
ber anything of this capsule.”

Ryker stared out at the Indians
now standing directly below the
veranda. Irritably he slammed
down the blind. “For God’s sake,
Pereira, they don’t. Tell the Lieu-
tenant he isn’t interviewing peo-
ple on Park Avenue or Piccadilly.
If the Indians had seen anything
I’d know.”

“Perhaps.” Pereira shrugged.
“Still, I’m under instructions to
assist Lieutenant Connolly and
it won’t do any harm to ask.”

Connolly sat up. “Having come
this far, Captain, I feel l should
do two or three forays into the
bush.” To Ryker he explained :
“They’ve recalculated the flight
path of the final trajectory,
there’s a chance he may have
come down further along the
landing zone. Here, very possi-
bly.”

Shaking his head, Ryker
slumped down on to the couch,
and drove one fist angrily into
the other. “I suppose this means
they’ll be landing here at any
time with thousands of bulldoz-
ers and flame-throwers. Dammit,
Lieutenant, if you have to send
a man to the Moon, why don’t
you do it in your own back
yard ?”

Pereira stood up. “We’ll be
gone in a couple of days, Ryker.”
He nodded judiciously at Con-
nolly and moved toward the door.

As Connolly climbed to his feet
Ryker called out suddenly:
“Lieutenant. You can tell me
something I’ve wondered.” There
was an unpleasant downward
curve to his mouth, and his tone
was belligerent and provocative.
“Why did they really send a man
to the Moon?”

Connolly paused. He had re-
mained silent during the conver-
sation, not wanting to antagon-
ize Ryker. The rudness and com-
plete self-immersion were pathet-
ic rather than annoying. “Do you
mean the military and political
reasons ?”

“No, I don’t.” Ryker stood up,
arms akimbo again, measuring
Connolly. “I mean the real rea-
sons, Lieutenant.”

C ONNOLLY gestured vaguely.

For some reason formulating
a satisfactory answer seemed
more difficult than he had ex-
pected. “Well, I suppose you could
say it was the natural spirit of
exploration.”

Ryker snorted derisively. “Do
you seriously believe that. Lieu-
tenant? ‘The spirit of explora-
tion!’ My God! What a fantastic
idea. Pereira doesn’t believe that,
do you Captain?”

Before Connolly could reply
Pereira took his arm. “Come on,
Lieutenant. This is no time for
a metaphysical discussion.” To
Ryker he added : “It doesn’t much
matter what you and I believe.

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

Ryker. A man went to the Moon
and came back. He needs our
help.”

Ryker frowned ruefully. "Poor
chap. He must be feeling pretty
hungry by now. Though anyone
who gets as far as the Moon and
is fool enough to come back de-
serves what he gets.”

There was a scuffle of feet on
the veranda, and as they stepped
out into the sunlight a couple of
Indians darted away along the
jetty, watching Connolly with
undiminished interest.

Ryker remained in the door-
way, staring listlessly at the
clock, but as they were about to
climb into the launch he came
after them. Now and then glanc-
ing over his shoulder at the en-
croaching semi-circle of Indians,
he gazed down at Connolly with
sardonic contempt. “Lieuten-
ant,” he called out before they
went below. “Has it occurred to
you that if he had landed. Spen-
der might have wanted to stay
on here?”

“I doubt it, Ryker,” Connolly
said calmly. “Anyway, there’s lit-
tle chance that Colonel Spender
is still alive. What we’re inter-
ested in finding is the capsule.”

Ryker was about to reply when
a faint metallic buzz sounded
from the direction of his hut. He
looked around sharply, waiting
for it to end, and for a moment
the whole tableau, composed of
the men on the launch, the gaunt

outcast on the edge of the jetty
and the Indians behind him, was
frozen in an absurdly motionless
posture. The mechanism of the
old alarm clock had obviously
been fully wound, and the buzz
sounded for thirty seconds, final-
ly ending with a high-pitched
ping.

Pereira grinned. He glanced
at his watch. “It keeps good time,
Ryker.” But Ryker had stalked
off back to the hut, scattering the
Indians before him.

Connolly watched the group
dissolve, then suddenly snapped
his fingers. “You’re right. Cap-
tain. It certainly does keep good
time,” he repeated as they en-
tered the cabin.

T^VIDENTLY tired by the en-
counter with Ryker, Pereira
slumped down among Connolly’s
equipment and unbuttoned his
tunic. "Sorry about Ryker, but I
warned you. Frankly, Lieutenant,
we might as well leave now.
There’s nothing here. Ryker
knows that. However, he’s no
fool, and he’s quite capable of
faking all sorts of evidence just
to get a retainer out of you. He
wouldn’t mind if the bulldozers
came.”

“I’m not so sure.” Connolly
glanced briefly through the port-
hole. “Captain, has Ryker got a
radio?”

“Of course not. Why?”

“Are you certain?”

FANTASTIC

"Absolutely. It’s the last thin?
the man would have. Anyway,
there’s no electrical supply here,
and he has no batteries.” He no-
ticed Connolly’s intent expres-
sion. "What’s on your mind, Lieu-
tenant?”

"You’re his only contact?
There are no other traders in the
area?”

"None. The Indians are too
dangerous, and there’s nothing
to trade. Why do you think Ryker
has a radio?”

"He must have. Or something
very similar. Captain, just now
you remarked on the fact that his
old alarm clock kept good time.
Does it occur to you to ask how?"

Pereira sat up slowly. “Lieu-
tenant, you have a valid point.”

"Exactly. I knew there was
something odd about those two
clocks when they were standing
side by side. That type of alarm
clock is the cheapest obtainable,
notoriously inaccurate. Often
they lose two or three minutes in
24 hours. But that clock was tell-
ing the right time to within ten
seconds. No optical instrument
would give him that degree of
accuracy.”

Pereira shrugged skeptically.
"But I haven’t been here for over
four months. And even then he
didn’t check the time with me.”

“Of course not. He didn’t need
to. The only possible explanation
for such a degree of accuracy is
that he’s getting a daily time fix.

either on a radio or some long-
range beacon.”

“Wait a moment. Lieutenant.”
Pereira watched the dusk light
fall across the jungle. “It’s a re-
markable coincidence, but there
must be an innocent explanation.
Don’t jump straight to the con-
clusion that Ryker has some in-
strument taken from the missing
Moon capsule. Other aircraft
have crashed in the forest. And
what would be the i>oint? He’s
not running an airline or railway
system. Why should he need to
know the time, the exact time, to
within ten seconds?”

Connolly tapped the lid of his
monitoring case, controlling his
growing exasperation at Per-
eira’s reluctance to treat the
matter seriously, at his whole
permissive attitude of lazy toler-
ance towards Ryker, the Indians
and the forest. Obviously he un-
consciously resented Connolly’s
sharp-eyed penetration of this
private world.

“Clocks have become his idee
fixe,” Pereira continued. “Per-
haps he’s developed an amazing
sensitivity to its mechanism.
Knowing exactly the right time
could be a substitute for the civi-
lization on which he turned his
back.” Thoughtfully, Pereira
moistened the end of his cheroot.
“But I agree that it’s strange.
Perhaps a little investigation
would be worth while after all.”

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

A fter a cool jungle night in
the air-conditioned cabin,
the next day Connolly began dis-
cretely to reconnoitre the area.
Pereira took ashore two bottles of
whiskey and a soda syphon, and
was able to keep Ryker distracted
while Connolly roved about the
campong with his monitoring
equipment. Once or twice he
heard Ryker bellow jocularly at
him from his window as he lolled
back over the whiskey. At inter-
vals, as Ryker slept, Pereira
would come out into the sun,
sweating like a drowzy pig in his
stained uniform, and try to drive
back the Indians.

“As long as you stay within
earshot of Ryker you’re safe,” he
told Connolly. Chopped-out path-
ways criss-crossed the bush at
all angles, a fresh pathway driv-
en through the foliage whenever
one of the bands returned to the
campong, irrespective of those
already established. This maze
extended for miles around them.
“If you get lost, don’t panic but
stay where you are. Sooner or
later we’ll come out and find
you.’’

Eventually giving up his at-
tempt to monitor any of the sig-
nal beacons built into the lost
capsule — both the sonar and ra-
dio meters remained at zero —
Connolly tried to communicate
with the Indians by sign lan-
guage, but with the exception of
one, the youth with the moist lim-

pid eyes who had been hanging
about on Ryker’s veranda, they
merely stared at him stonily. This
youth Pereira identified as the
son of the former witch-doctor
(“Ryker’s more or less usurped
his role, for some reason the old
boy lost the confidence of the
tribe’’). While the other Indians
gazed at Connolly as if seeing
some invisible numinous shad-
ow, some extra-corporeal nimbus
which pervaded his body, the
youth was obviously aware that
Connolly possessed some si>ecial
talent, perhaps not dissimilar
from that which his father had
once practised. However, Con-
nolly’s attempts to talk to the
youth were handicapped by the
fact that he was suffering from
a purulent ophthalmia, gonococ-
chic in origin and extremely con-
tagious, which made his eyes wa-
ter continuously. Many of the In-
dians suffered from this com-
plaint, threatened by permanent
blindness, and Connolly had seen
them treating their eyes with wa-
ter in which a certain type of
fragrant bark had been dis-
solved.

"DYKER’S casual, off-hand au-
thority over the Indiana
puzzled Connolly. Slumped back
in his chair against the mahog-
any dresser, one hand touching
the ormolu clock, most of the time
he and Pereira indulged in a
lachrymose back-chat. Then, ob-

FANTASTIC

livious of any danger, Ryker
would amble out into the dusty
campong, push his way blurrily
through the Indians and drum
up a party to collect fire wood for
the water still, jerking them bod-
ily to their feet as they squatted
about their huts. What interested
Connolly was the Indians’ reac-
tion to this type of treatment.
They seemed to be restrained, not
by any belief in. his strength of
personality on primitive king-
ship, but by a grudging accept-
ance that for the time being at
any rate, Ryker possessed the
whip hand over them all. Obvi-
ously Ryker served certain useful
roles for them as an intermedi-
ary with the Mission, but this
alone would not explain the sourc-
es of his power. Beyond certain
more or less defined limits — the
perimeter of the campong — his
authority was minimal.

A hint of explanation came on
the second morning of their visit,
when Connolly accidentally lost
himself in the forest.

•X* ‘}f

A FTER breakfast Connolly sat
under the awning on the deck
of the patrol launch, gazing out
over the brown, jelly-like surface
of the river. The campong was
silent. During the night the In-
dians had disappeared into the
bush. Like lemmings they were
apparently prone to these sudden

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

irresistible urges. Occasionally
the nomadic call would be strong
enough to carry them 200 miles
away; at other times they would
set off in high spirits and then
lose interest after a few miles,
returning dispiritedly to the cam-
pong in small groups.

Deciding to make the most of
their absence, Connolly shoul-
dered the monitoring equipment
and climbed onto the pier. A few
dying fires smoked plaintively
among the huts, and abandoned
utensils and smashed pottery lay
about in the red dust. In the dis-
tance the morning haze over the
forest had lifted, and Connolly
could see what appeared to be a
low hill — a shallow rise no more
than a hundred feet in height —
which rose off the flat floor of the
jungle a quarter of a mile away.

On his right, among the huts,
someone moved. An old man sat
alone among the refuse of pot-
tery shards and raffia baskets,
cross-legged under a small make-
shift awning. Barely distinguish-
able from the dust, his diseased
moribund figure seemed to con-
tain the whole futility and deg-
radation of the Amazon forest.

Still musing on Ryker’s mo-
tives for isolating himself in the
jungle, Connolly made his way
towards the distant rise.

Ryker’s behavior the previous
evening had been curious.
Shortly after dusk, when the sun-
set sank into the western forest.

bathing the jungle in an immense
ultramarine and golden light, the
day-long chatter and movement
of the Indians ceased abruptly.
Connolly had been glad of the
silence — the endless thwacks of
the rattan canes and grating of
the stone mills in which they
mixed the Government-issue meal
had become tiresome. Pereira
made several cautious visits to
the edge of the campong, and
each time reported that the In-
dians were sitting in a huge cir-
cle outside their huts, watching
Ryker’s bungalow. The latter was
lounging on his veranda in the
moonlight, chin in hand, one boot
up on the rail, morosely survey-
ing the assembled tribe.

“They’ve got their spears and
ceremonial feathers,” Pereira
whispered. “For a moment I al-
most believed they were prepar-
ing an attack.”

After waiting half an hour,
Connolly climbed up on to the
pier, found the Indians squatting
in their dark silent circle, Ryker
glaring down at them. Only the
witch-doctor’s son made any at-
tempt to approach Connolly, sid-
ling tentatively through the shad-
ows, a piece of what appeared to
be blue obsidian in his hand,
some talisman of his father’s that
had lost its potency.

Uneasily, Connolly returned to
the launch, and shortly after 3
a.m. they were wakened in their
buhks by a tremendous whoop.

reached the deck to hear the
stampede of feet through the
dust, the hissing of overturned
fires and cooking pots. Apparent-
ly leading the pack, Ryker, emit-
ting a series of re-echoed ‘Ha-
rooh’s!’, disappeared into the
bush. Within a minute the cam-
pong was empty.

“What game is Ryker play-
ing?” Pereira muttered as they
stood on the creaking jetty in the
dusty moonlight. “This must be
the focus of his authority over
the Nambas.” Baffled, they went
back to their bunks.

R eaching the margins of the
rise, Connolly strolled
through a small orchard which
had returned to nature, hearing
in his mind the exultant roar of
Ryker’s voice as it had cleaved
the midnight jungle. Idly he
picked a few of the barely ripe
guavas and vividly colored cajus
with their astringent delicately
flavored juice. After spitting
away the pith, he searched for a
way out of the orchard, within a
few minutes realized that he was
lost.

A continuous mound when
seen from the distance, the rise
was in fact a nexus of small hill-
ocks that formed the residue of
a one-time system of ox-bow
lakes, and the basins between the
slopes were still treacherous with
deep mire. Connolly rested his
equipment at the foot of a tree.

FANTASTIC

Withdrawing his pistol, he fired
two shots into the air in the hope
of attracting Kyker and Pereira,
He sat down to await his rescue,
taking the opportunity to un-
latch his monitors and wipe the
dials.

After ten minutes no one had
appeared. Feeling slightly de-
moralized, and frightened that
the Indians might return and
find him, Connolly shouldered his
equipment and set off towards
the north-west, in the approxi-
mate direction of the campong.
The ground rose before him.
Suddenly, as he turned behind a
palisade of wild magnolia trees,
he stepped into an open clearing
on the crest of the hill.

Squatting on their heels
against the tree-trunks and
among the tall grass were what
seemed to be the entire tribe of
the Nambikwaras. They were
facing him, their expressions im-
mobile and watchful, eyes like
white beads among the sheaves.
Presumably they had been sit-
ting in the clearing, only fifty
yards away, when he fired his
shots, and Connolly had the un-
canny feeling that they had been
waiting for him to make his en-
trance exactly at the point he had
chosen.

Hesitating, Connolly tight-
ened his grip on the radio moni-
tor. The Indians faces were like
burnished teak, their shoulders
painted with a delicate mosaic of

earth colors. Noticing the
spears held among the grass,
Connolly started to walk on
across the clearing towards a
breach in the palisade of trees.

For a dozen steps the Indians
remained motionless. Then, with
a chorus of yells, they leapt for-
ward from the grass and sur-
rounded Connolly in a jabbering
pack. None of them were more
than five feet tall, but their
plump agile bodies buffeted him
about, almost knocking him off
his feet. Eventually the tumult
steadied itself, and two or three
of the leaders stepped from the
cordon and began to scrutinize
Connolly more closely, pinching
and fingering him with curious
positional movements of the
thumb and forefinger, like con-
noisseurs examining some inter-
esting taxidermic object.

F inally, with a series of
high-pitched whines and
grunts, the Indians moved off to-
wards the center of the clearing,
propelling Connolly in front of
them with sharp slaps on his legs
and shoulders, like drovers
goading on a large pig. They
were all jabbering furiously to
each other, some hacking at the
grass with their machetes, gath-
ering bundles of leaves in their
arms.

Tripping over something in the
grass, Connolly stumbled onto
his knees. The catch slipped

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

from the lid of the monitor, and
as he stood up, fumbling with
the heavy cabinet, the revolver
slipped from his holster and was
lost under his feet in the rush.

Giving way to his panic, he be-
gan to shout over the bobbing
heads around him, to his surprise
he heard one of the Indians beside
him bellow to the others. Instant-
ly, as the refrain was taken up,
the crowd stopped and re-formed
its cordon around him. Gasping,
Connolly steadied himself, and
started to search the trampled
grass for his revolver, when he
realized that the Indians were
now staring, not at himself, but
at the exposed counters of the
monitor. The six meters were
swinging wildly after the stam-
pede across the clearing, and the
Indians craned forward, their
machetes and spears lowered,
gaping at the bobbing needles.

Then there was a roar from
the edge of the clearing, and a
huge wild-faced man in a straw
hat, a shot-gun held like a crow-
bar in his massive hands, stormed
in among the Indiana, driving
them back. Dragging the moni-
tor from his neck, Connolly felt
the steadying hand of Captain
Pereira take his elbow.

“Lieutenant, Lieutenant,” Per-
eira murmured reprovingly as
they recovered the pistol and
made their way back to the cam-
pong, the uproar behind them
fading among the undergrowth.

"we were nearly in time to say
grace.”

« * *

L ater that afternoon Con-
nolly sat back in a canvas
chair on the deck of the launch.
About half the Indians had re-
turned, and were wandering
about the huts in a desultory
manner, kicking at the fires. Ry-
ker, his authority re-asserted,
had returned to his bungalow.

“I thought you said they
weren’t cannibal,” Connolly re-
minded Pereira.

The Captain snapped his fin-
gers, as if thinking about some-
thing more important. “No
they’re not. Stop worrying. Lieu-
tenant, you’re not going to end
up in a pot.” When Connolly de-
murred he swung crisply on his
heel. He had sharpened up his
uniform, and wore his pistol belt
and Sam Browne at their regula-
tion position, his peaked cap jut-
ting low over his eyes. Evidently
Connolly’s close escape had con-
firmed some private suspicion.
“Look, they’re not cannibal in the
dietary sense of the term, as used
by the Food & Agriculture Or-
ganization in its classification of
aboriginal peoples. They won’t
stalk and hunt human game in
preference for any other. But — ”
here the Captain stared fixedly
at Connolly” — in certain circum-
stances, after a fertility ceremon-

FANTASTIC

ial, for example, they will eat hu-
man flesh. Like all members of
primitive communities which are
small numerically, the Nambik-
wara never bury their dead. In-
stead, they eat them, as a means
of conserving the loss and to
perpetuate the corporeal identity
of the departed. Now do you un-
derstand ?"

Connolly grimaced. “I’m glad
to know now that I was about to
be perpetuated.”

Pereira looked out at the cam-
pong. “Actually they would never
eat a white man, to avoid defiling
the tribe.” He paused. “At least,
so I’ve always believed. It’s
strange, something seems to
have. . . . Listen, Lieutenant,”
he explained, “I can’t quite piece
it together, but I’m convinced
we should stay here for a few
days longer. Various elements
make me suspicious, I’m sure
Ryker is hiding something. That
mound where you were lost is a
sort of sacred tumulus, the way
the Indians were looking at your
instrument made me certain that
they’d seen something like it be-
fore — perhaps a panel with many
flickering dials. . .

“The Goliath 7?” Connolly
shook his head skeptically. He
listened to the massive undertow
of the river drumming dimly
against the keel of the launch.
“I doubt it. Captain. I’d like to
believe you, but for some reason
it just doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I agree. Some other explana-
tion is preferable. But what ? The
Indians were squatting on that
hill, waiting for someone to ar-
rive. What else could your moni-
tor have reminded them of ?”

“Ryker’s clock?” Connolly sug-
gested. “They may regard it as
a sort of ju-ju object, like a magi-
cal toy.”

“No,” Pereira said categori-
cally. “These Indians are highly
pragmatic, they’re not impressed
by useless toys. For them to be
deterred from killing you means
that the equipment you carried
possessed some very real, down-
to-earth power. Look, suppose the
capsule did land here and was
secretly buried by Ryker, and
that in some way the clocks help
him to identify its whereabouts
— ” here Pereira shrugged hope-
fully “ — it’s just possible.”

H ardly,” Connolly said. “Be-
sides, Ryker couldn’t have
buried the capsule himself, and
if Colonel Spender had lived
through re-entry Ryker would
have helped him.”

“I’m not so sure,” Pereira said
pensively. “It would probably
strike our friend Mr. Ryker as
very funny for a man to travel
all the way to the Moon and back
just to be killed by savages. Much
too good a joke to pass over.”

"What religious beliefs do the
Indians have?” Connolly asked.
"No religion in the formalized

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

sense of a creed and dogma. They
eat their dead so they don’t need
to invent an after-life in an at-
tempt to re-animate them. In gen-
eral they subscribe to one of the
so-called cargo cults. As I said,
they’re very material. That’s
why they’re so lazy. Some time
in the future they expect a magic
galleon or giant bird to arrive
carrying an everlasting cornuco-
pia of worldly goods, so they just
sit about waiting for the great
day. Ryker encourages them in
this idea. It’s very dangerous —
in some Melanesian islands the
tribes with cargo cults have de-
generated completely. They lie
around all day on the beaches,
waiting for the W.H.O. flying
boat, or . . .” His voice trailed
off.

Connolly nodded and supplied
the unspoken thought. “Or — a
space capsule?’’

D espite Pereira’s growing if
muddled conviction that some-
thing associated with the miss-
ing space-craft was to be found
in the area, Connolly was still
skeptical. His close escape had
left him feeling curiously calm
and emotionless, and he looked
back on his possible death with
fatalistic detachment, identify-
ing it with the total ebb and flow
of life in the Amazon forests,
with its myriad unremembered

deaths, and with the endless vis-
tas of dead trees leaning across
the jungle paths radiating from
the campong. After only two days
the jungle had begun to invest
his mind with its own logic, and
the possibility of the space-craft
landing there seemed more and
more remote. The two elements
belonged to different systems of
natural order, and he found it
increasingly difficult to visualize
them overlapping. In addition
there was a deeper reason for his
skepticism, underlined by Ryker’s
reference to the ‘real’ reasons for
the space-flights. The implication
was that the entire space pro-
gram was a symptom of some in-
ner unconscious malaise afflicting
mankind, and in particular the
western technocracies, and that
the space craft and satellites had
been launched because their
flights satisfied certain buried
compulsions and desires. By con-
trast, in the jungle, where the
unconscious was manifest and ex-
posed, there was no need for
these insane projections, and the
likelihood of the Amazonas play-
ing any part in the success or
failure of the space flight be-
came, by a sort of psychological
parallax, increasingly blurred
and distant, the missing capsule
itself a fragment of a huge dis-
integrating fantasy.

However he agreed to Pereira’s
request to borrow the monitors
and follow Ryker and the Indians

FANTASTIC

on their midnight romp through
the forest.

Once again, after dusk, the
same ritual silence descended
over the campong, and the In-
dians took up their positions in
the doors of their huts. Like
some morose exiled princeling,
Ryker sat sprawled on his veran-
da, one eye on the clock through
the window behind him. In the
moonlight the scores of moist
dark eyes never wavered as they
watched him.

At last, half an hour later,
Ryker galvanized his great body
into life, with a series of tre-
mendous whoops raced off across
the campong, leading the stam-
pede into the bush. Away in the
distance, faintly outlined by the
quarter moon, the shallow hump
of the tribal tumulus rose over
the black canopy of the jungle.
Pereira waited until the last heel
beats had subsided, then climbed
onto the pier and disappeared
among the shadows.

Far away Connolly could hear
the faint cries of Ryker’s pack as
they made off through the bush,
the sounds of machetes slashing
at the undergrowth. An ember
on the opposite side of the cam-
pong flared in the low wind, il-
luminating the abandoned old
man, presumably the former
witch doctor, whom he had seen
that morning. Beside him was
another slimmer figure, the lim-

pid-eyed youth who had followed
Connolly about.

A door stirred on Ryker’s ver-
anda, providing Connolly with a
distant image of the white moon-
lit back of the river reflected in
the mirrors of the mahogany
dresser. Connolly watched the
door jump lightly against the
latch, then walked quietly across
the pier to the wooden steps.

A few empty tobacco tins lay
about on the shelves around the
room, and a stack of empty bot-
tles cluttered one corner behind
the door. The ormolu clock had
been locked away in the mahog-
any dresser. After testing the
doors, which had been secured
with a stout padlock, Connolly
noticed a dog-eared paper-backed
book lying on the dresser beside
a half-empty carton of cartridges.

O N a faded red ground, the
small black lettering on the
cover was barely decipherable,
blurred by the sweat from Ry-
ker’s fingers. At first glance it
appeared to be a set of logarithm
tables. Each of the eighty or so
pages was covered with column
after column of finely printed
numerals and tabular material.

Curious, Connolly carried the
manual over to the doorway. The
title page was more explicit.

ECHO III

CONSOLIDATED TABLES OP
CELESTIAL TRAVELERS

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

1966-1980. TIMES
THROUGHOUT G.M.T.
Published by the National
Astronautics and Space Ad-
ministration, Washington,
D.C., 1965. Part XV. Longi-
tude 40-80 West, Latitude
10 North-35 South (South
American Sub-Continent)
Price 35^.

His interest quickening, Con-
nolly turned the pages. The man-
ual fell open at the section head-
ed : Lat. 5 South, Long. 60 West.
He remembered that this was the
approximate position of Campos
Buros. Tabulated by year, month
and day, the columns of figures
listed the elevations and compass
bearings for sighting of the Echo
III satellite, the latest of the huge
aluminium spheres which had
been orbiting the earth since
Echo I was launched in 1959.
Rough pencil lines had been
drawn through all the entries up
to the year 1968. At this point
the markings became individual,
each minuscule entry crossed off
with a small blunt stroke. The
pages were grey with the blurred
graphite.

Guided by this careful patch-
work of cross-hatching, Connolly
found the latest entry : March 17,
1978. The time and sighting
were: 6-22 a.m. Elevation US de-
grees WNW, Copella-Eridanus.
Below it was the entry for the
next day, an hour later, its orien-
tations differing slightly.

Ruefully shaking his head in
admiration of Ryker’s cleverness,
Connolly looked at his watch. It
was about 1-20, almost exactly
five hours until the next tra-
verse. Connolly glanced perfunc-
torily at the sky, picking out the
constellation Capella, from which
the satellite would emerge.

So this explained Ryker’s hold
over the Indians ! What more im-
iwessive means had a down-and-
out white man of intimidating
and astonishing a tribe of primi-
tive savages? Armed with noth-
ing more than a set of tables and
a reliable clock, he could virtually
pin-point the appearance of the
satellite at the first second of its
visible traverse. The Indians
would naturally be awed and be-
wildered by this phantom char-
ioteer of the midnight sky, stead-
ily pursuing its cosmic round,
like a beacon traversing the
profoundest deeps of their own
unconscious. Any powers which
Ryker cared to invest in the satel-
lite would seem confirmed by his
ability to control the time and
place of its arrival.

C ONNOLLY realized now how
the old alarm clock had told
the correct time — by using his
tables Ryker had read the exact
time off the sky each night. A
more accurate clock presumably
freed him from the need to spend
unnecessary time waiting for the
satellite’s arrival; he would now

FANTASTIC

be able to set off for the tumulus
only a few minutes beforehand.

Yet tonight he had gone out
five hours early? Puzzling over
this, Connolly noticed that the
manual employed Greenwich
Mean Time, and that the satellite
would appear over the forest at
1-22 a.m. local time.

Backing along the pier, he be-
gan to search the sky. Away in
the distance a low cry sounded
into the midnight air, diffusing
like a wraith over the jungle. Be-
side him, sitting on the bows of
the launch, Connolly heard the
helmsman grunt and point at the
sky above the opposite bank.
Following the up-raised arm, he
quickly found the speeding dot
of light. It was moving directly
towards the tumulus, and Con-
nolly visualized the awe and con-
sternation that would be mani-
fest there. Steadily the satellite
crossed the sky, winking inter-
mittently as it passed behind
lanes of high-altitude cirrus, the
conscripted ship of the Nambik-
waras’ cargo cult.

It was about to disappear
among the stars in the south-east
when a faint shuffling sound dis-
tracted Connolly. He looked down
to find the moist-eyed youth, the
son of the witch doctor, standing
only a few feet away from him,
regarding him dolefully.

“Hello, boy,” Connolly greeted
him. He pointed at the vanishing
satellite. “See the star?”

The youth made a barely per-
ceptible nod. He hesitated for a
moment, his running eyes glow-
ing like drowned moons, then
stepped forward and touched
Connolly’s wrist-watch, tapping
the dial with his horny finger
nail.

Puzzled, Connolly held it up
for him to inspect. The youth
watched the second hand sweep
around the dial, an expression of
rapt and ecstatic concentration
on his face. Nodding vigorously,
he pointed to the sky.

Connolly grinned. “So you un-
deratand? You’ve rumbled old
man Ryker, have you?” He nod-
ded encouragingly to the youth,
who was tapping the watch eag-
erly, apparently in an effort to
conjure up a second satellite.
Connolly began to laugh. “Sorry,
boy.” He slapped the manual.
“What you really need is this
pack of jokers.”

C ONNOLLY began to walk back
to the bungalow, when the
youth darted forward impulsive-
ly and blocked his way, thin legs
spread widely in an aggressive
stance. Then, with immense cere-
mony, he drew from behind his
back a round painted object with
a glass face that Connolly re-
membered he had seen him carry-
ing before.

“That looks interesting.” Con-
nolly bent down to examine the
object, caught a glimpse in the

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

thin light of a luminous instru-
ment dial before the youth
snatched it away.

“Wait a minute, boy. Let’s
have another look at that.”

After a pause the pantomime
was repeated, but the youth was
reluctant to allow Connolly more
than the briefest inspection.
Again Connolly saw a calibrated
dial and a wavering indicator.
He searched his pockets for some-
thing the youth would accept,
when the latter stepped forward
and touched Connolly’s wrist.

Quickly Connolly unstrapped
the metal chain. He tossed the
watch to the youth, who instantly
dropped the instrument, his bar-
ter achieved, and after a de-
lighted yodel turned and darted
off among the trees.

Bending down, careful not to
touch the instrument with his
hands, Connolly examined the
dial. The metal housing around it
was badly torn and scratched, as
if the instrument had been pried
from some control panel with a
crude implement. But the glass
face and the dial beneath it were
still intact. Across the center
was the legend:

LUNAR ALTIMETER
Miles : 100
GOLIATH 7

General Electric Corporation,
Schenectedy

Picking up the instrument,
Connolly cradled it in his hands,
for a moment feeling like Parsi-

fal holding the Holy Grail. The
pressure seals were unbroken,
and the gyro bath floated freely
on its air cushion. Like a grace-
ful bird the indicator needle
glided up and down the scale.

T he pier creaked softly under
approaching footsteps. Con-
nolly looked up at the perspiring
figure of Captain Pereira, cap in
one hand, monitor dangling from
the other.

“My dear Lieutenant!” he
panted, “Wait till I tell you, what
a farce, it’s fantastic! Do you
know what Ryker’s doing? — it’s
so simple it seems unbelievable
that no one’s thought of it before.
It’s nothing short of the most
magnificent practical joke!”
Gasping, he sat down on the bale
of skins leaning against the
gangway. “I’ll give you a clue;
Narcissus.”

“Echo,” Connolly replied flatly,
still staring at the instrument in
his hands.

“You spotted it? Clever boy!”
Pereira wiped his cap-band.
“How did you guess? It wasn’t
that obvious.” He took the man-
ual Connolly handed him. “What
the — ? Ah, I see, this makes it
even more clear. Of course.” He
slapped his knee with the man-
ual. “You found this in his room?
I take my hat off to Ryker,” he
continued as Connolly set the al-
timeter down on the pier and
steadied it carefully. “Let’s face

FANTASTIC

it, it’s something of a pretty
clever trick. Can you imagine it,
he comes here, finds a tribe with
a strong cargo cult, opens his
little manual and says ‘Presto,
the great white bird will be ar-
riving : NOW !’ ”

Connolly nodded, then stood up,
wiping his hands on a strip of
rattan. When Pereira’s laughter
had subsided he pointed down to
the glowing face of the altimeter
at their feet. “Captain, something
else arrived,’’ he said quietly.
“Never mind Kyker and the satel-
lite. This cargo actually landed.”

As Pereira knelt down and in-
spected the altimeter, whistling
sharply to himself, Connolly
walked over to the edge of the
pier and looked out across the
great back of the silent river at
the giant trees which hung over
the water, like foi’lorn mutes at
some cataclysmic funeral, their
thin silver voices carried away
on the dead tide.

« * *

TTALF an hour before they set
off the next morning, Con-
nolly waited on the deck for Cap-
tain Pereira to conclude his in-
terrogation of Ryker. The empty
campong, deserted again by the
Indians, basked in the heat, a
single plume of smoke curling
into the sky. The old witch doctor
and his son had disappeared, per-
haps to try their skill with a

A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

neighboring tribe, but the loss of
his watch was unregretted by
Connolly. Down below, safely
stowed away among his baggage,
was the altimeter, carefully ster-
ilized and sealed. On the table in
front of him, no more than two
feet from the pistol in his belt,
lay Ryker’s manual.

For some reason he did not
want to see Ryker, despite his
contempt for him, and when
Pereira emerged from the bunga-
low he was relieved to see that he
was alone. Connolly had decided
that he would not return with
the search parties when they
came to find the capsule ; Pereira
would serve adequately as a
guide.

"Well ?”

The Captain smiled wanly.
“Oh, he admitted it, of course.”
He sat down on the rail, and
pointed to the manual. “After all,
he had no choice. Without that
his existence here would be un-
tenable.”

“He admitted that Colonel
Spender landed here?”

Pereira nodded. “Not in so
many words, but effectively. The
capsule is buried somewhere here
— under the tumulus, I would
guess. The Indians got hold of
Colonel Si)ender, Ryker claims he
could do nothing to help him.”

“That’s a lie. He saved me in
the bush when the Indians
thought I had landed.”

With a shrug, Pereira said:

“Your positions were slightly
different. Besides, my impression
is that Spender was dying any-
way, Ryker says the parachute
was badly burnt. He probably ac-
cepted a fa/it accompli, simply
decided to do nothing and hush
the whole thing up, incorporat-
ing the landing into the cargo
cult. Very useful too. He’d been
tricking the Indians with the
Echo satellite, but sooner or la-
ter they would have become im-
patient. Ater the Goliath
crashed, of course, they were
prepared to go on watching the
Echo and waiting for the next
landing forever.” A faint smile
touched his lips. “It goes without
saying that he regards the epi-
sode as something of a macabre
joke. On you and the whole civil-
ized world.”

A DOOR slammed on the ver-
anda, and Ryker stepped out
into the sunlight. Bare-chested
and hatless, he strode towards the
launch.

“Connolly,” he called down,
“you’ve got my book of tricks
there !”

Connolly reached forward and
fingered the manual, the butt of
his pistol tapping the table edge.
He looked up at Ryker, at his big
golden frame bathed in the morn-
ing light. Despite his still bellig-
erent tone, a subtle change had
come over Ryker. The ironic
gleam in his eye had gone, and

the inner core of wariness and
suspicion which had warped the
man and exiled him from the
world was now visible. Connolly
realized that, curiously, their re-
spective roles had been reversed.
He remembered Pereira remind-
ing him that the Indians were at
equilibrium with their environ-
ment, accepting its constraints
and never seeking to dominate
the towering arbors of the forest,
in a sense an externalization of
their own unconscious psyches.
Ryker had upset that equilibri-
um, and by using the Echo satel-
lite had brought the 20th cen-
tury and its psychopathic pro-
jections into the heart of the
Amazonian deep, transforming
the Indians into a community of
superstitious and materialistic
sightseers, their whole culture
oriented around the mythical god
of the puppet star. It was Con-
nolly who now accepted the
jungle for what it was, acknowl-
edging its fatalism and implac-
able indifference, seeing himself
and the abortive space-flight in
this fresh perspective, where
tragedy and triumph were equal-
ly vainglorious.

Pereira gestured to the helms-
man, and with a muffled roar the
engine started. The launch pulled
lightly against its lines.

“Connolly!” Ryker’s voice was
shriller now, his bellicose shout
overlayed by a higher note. For
a moment the two men looked at

FANTASTIC

each other, and in the ■wavering,
almost craven eyes above him
Connolly glimpsed the helpless
isolation of Ryker, his futile at-
tempt to impose his will on the
forest.

Picking up the manual, Con-
nolly leaned forward and tossed
it through the air on to the pier.
Ryker tried to catch it, then knelt
down and picked it up before it
slipped through the springing
poles. Still kneeling, he watched
as the lines were cast off and the
launch surged ahead.

They moved out into the chan-
nel and plunged through the
bowers of spray into the heavier
swells of the open current.

As they reached a sheltering
bend and the somber figure of
Ryker faded for the last time
among the creepers and sunlight,
Connolly turned to Pereira.
"Captain — what actually hap-
pened to Colonel Spender? You
said the Indians wouldn’t eat a
white man.”

"They eat their gods,” Pereira
said. the end

★ ★ ★

COMING NEXT MONTH

There's no let-up to the weird
excitement FANTASTIC Maga-
zine brings you. For example,
the April issue will feature a
long novelet by Philip Jose
Farmer, Some Fabulous Yon-
der; an uncanny short story by
Fritz Leiber, The Casket De-
mon; and a Fantasy Classic
by Erie Stanley Gardner,
Rain Magic.

PLUS other short stories, and
all our regular features, and
a magnificent and different
cover Illustration (I.) by a new
artist, Frank Bruno.

Be sure to get the April FANTASTIC at newsstands March 19.

From the French of Guy de Maupassant

lllustratof COYE

Devotees of fantasy have so thoroughly ransacked the litera-
ture of the past that seldom can we hope to find a tale from
times gone by. But recently we found an old and tattered vol-
ume of short stories and in it no less than three narratives we
think you will enjoy. The first is a ghost story in the ancient
tradition, written by France's master short-story craftsman.

I T was at the end of an evening
of intimate social chat, in an
old family mansion, and each one
told a story of his or her personal
experience — and vouched- for the
truth of it. Just then the old
Marquis de la Tour-Samuel,
eighty-two years old, rose and
stood leaning against the chim-
ney-piece, saying in a slightly
trembling voice :

I, too, know a strange thing,
so strange that it has been the
bane of my life. It is now fifty-
six years since it happened to
me, and not a month has passed
without my dreaming of it. I
have had ever since that day a
mark, a scar of fear, as it were.
Yes, I went through such a horri-
ble experience for ten minutes.

that ever since I have had a con-
stant terror. Unexpected noises
make me tremble to the depths of
my heart; things which I cannot
see clearly in the twilight make
me have a wild desire to run
away, and I actually dread night-
fall. Oh! I should not have told
you all this if I were not so old.
Now I can say anything. One is
not expected to be brave before
imaginary dangers at my age,
but I assure you, ladies, that I
have never quailed before real
ones. This experience affected me
so deeply and mysteriously that
I have never yet told a soul of it,
but have kept the secret locked in
my breast, as if it were some-
thing to be ashamed of.

I will tell you the adventure as

it happened, without trying to
explain it. In fact, there is no
possible explanation unless you
assume that I was for the time
out of my mind. But I was not
out of my mind, and I will prove
it to you, so you may think what
you like, but here are the bare
facts.

It was in July, 1827, and I was
in garrison at Eouen. One day,
as I was walking on the quay, I
met a man whom I thought I
knew, though I could not quite
recall who it was. I made instinc-
tively a motion to stop. The
stranger saw the movement,
looked at me, and fell into my
arms. It was a friend of my boy-
hood, of whom I was very fond.
In the five years since I had last
seen him, he seemed to have
grown older by half a century.
His hair was perfectly white,
and he walked with a stoop, as if
worn out. He understood my sur-
prise and told me his story. A
terrible misfortune had made
him a broken man.

Having fallen madly in love
with a young girl, he had mar-
ried her in a sort of ecstasy of
happiness. After a year of unal-
loyed bliss she had suddenly died
from some heart trouble, un-
doubtedly killed by love itself.
He left his chateau the very day
of the funeral and came to live in
his house in Rouen, alone and
desperate, overcome by grief,
and thinking only of suicide.

"Since I have found you
again,” he said to me, “I am go-
ing to ask you to do me a great
service. It is to go and look for
me in the desk in my room — in
our room — for some papers of
which I am in great need. I can-
not entrust this task to a servant
or an agent, because it is neces-
sary to have it done with great
discretion and absolute silence.
As for me, nothing would induce
me to enter that house again, I
will give you the key of the room,
which I myself locked on leaving,
and the key of my desk. You will
also have a message from me to
my gardener, who will open the
chateau for you. But come and
breakfast with me to-morrow,
and we will talk it over.”

I promised to do him this
slight service. It was but a short
jaunt for me, his house being
situated about five leagues from
Rouen.

A t ten o’clock the next morn-
ing I was with him. We
breakfasted together, but he did
not speak twenty words. He
begged me to excuse him, saying
that the thought of the visit
which I was going to make to the
room where his happiness lay
buried was too much for him. He
did indeed seem to me to be
strangely moved, preoccupied, as
if a mysterious struggle were go-
ing on in his soul. At last he ex-
plained to me exactly what I was

FANTASTIC

to do, which was to get two pack-
ages of letters and one of papers
which were in the first right-
hand drawer of the desk to which
I had the key. He added : “I need
not ask you not to look about
you.”

I was a little hurt by these
words, and told him so rather
sharply. He stammered, “Forgive
me, I am suffering so much,” and
he began to cry.

I left him about one o’clock to
do my errand.

It was a glorious day, and I
went at a rapid trot across the
meadows, listening to the sing-
ing of the skylarks and the
rhythmical sound of my sword
against my boot. Before long I
entered the forest and brought
my horse to a walk. The branches
of the trees brushed my face, and
occasionally I bit off a leaf and
crunched it eagerly, in one of
those ecstasies of life which fills
us, we know not how, with a
flood of happiness, a sort of in-
toxication of strength.

As I neared the chateau, I felt
in my pocket for the letter which
I had for the gardener, and I saw
to my surprise that it was sealed.
I was so wounded and provoked
that I thought of returning with-
out carrying out my intention.
Then I reflected that by doing
this I should show unnecessary
feeling. My friend had probably
sealed the note mechanically, in
the trouble he was in.

The house had the air of hav-
ing been abandoned for twenty
years. The entrance gate, open
and rotten, remained upright by
a miracle. Grass choked the path-
ways, and the borders of the
grass-plots were no longer to be
seen.

At the noise which I made by
kicking against a shutter, an old
man came out of a side door and
seemed stupefied at seeing me. I
jumped to the ground and gave
him my letter. He read it, re-read
it, turned it, looked me over, put
it in his pocket and said:

“Well, what do you want?”

I answered brusquely :

“You ought to know, as you
have just read your master’s or-
ders. I want to go into the house.”

He seemed overcome and ex-
claimed :

“Then you are going into —
into his room?”

I began to grow impatient.
“What! are you going to ques-
tion me?”

“No, sir, but it has — has not
been opened since — since the
death. If you will wait five min-
utes I will go — go see, if ”

I interrupted him angrily.
"Oh, indeed; you will get it in
order for me when you can’t
even get in, for I have the key.”

He could say no more.

“Then, sir, I will show you the
way.”

“Just show me the staircase. I
can find it very well without you.”

AN APPARITION

"But, sir, indeed I must — ’’
This time I quite lost my tem-
per.

"Be silent, or you will get your-
self into trouble,” and I pushed
him roughly aside and entered
the house. I passed through the
kitchen, then through two little
rooms in which the man and his
wife lived, and reached a large
hall. I climbed the stairs and rec-
ognized the door described by my
friend. I opened it without diffi-
culty and entered.

T he room was so dark that at
first I could distinguish noth-
ing. I paused, struck by the
mouldy, musty smell of shut-up,
lifeless rooms. Then, by degrees,
my eyes became used to the
gloom, and I saw clearly enough
a large disordered room, with a
bed without hangings, but with
mattress and pillows, of which
one still bore the deep imprint of
a head, as if some one had just
been lying there. The chairs were
scattered about, and I noticed
that one door, probably that of a
closet, was half open.

I went first to the window to
get some light, and opened it;
but the hinges cff the outside
shutters were so rusty that I
could not move them. I even tried
to break the shutters with my
sword, but could not succeed.

As I was tired of these useless
efforts, and as my eyes were now
quite used to the dim light, I gave

up the hope of seeing more clear-
ly and went to the desk. I sat
down in an easy-chair, lowered
the lid, and opened the drawer. It
was full to the brim. I only need-
ed three packages and knew how
to recognize them, so I began the
search.

I was straining my eyes to de-
cipher the superscriptions, when
I thought I heard, or rather felt,
a slight rustling behind me. I
took no notice of it, thinking that
a draught of air had made some-
thing move. But at the end of
a minute, another movement,
scarcely perceptible, made a very
disagreeable shiver creep over
me. It was so silly to be affected,
even slightly, that I did not like
to turn around, for very shame.
I had secured the second bundle
that I wanted, and had just
found the third, when a deep and
painful sigh, breathed over my
shoulder, made me leap madly
two yards away. I turned in my
flight, with my hand on my
sword-hilt, and indeed, if I had
not felt that at my side I should
have fled like a coward.

A large woman, in white, was
standing behind the chair in
which I had been sitting the in-
stant before, looking at me.

Such a shiver ran through my
limbs that I could not stand. Oh !
no one who has not felt it can
understand this frightful terror.
One’s brain reels, one’s heart
stands still, one’s whole body be-

FANTASTIC

comes like a sponge ; it seems as
if one's being crumbled. I do not
believe in ghosts, but I have
yielded to the hideous fear of the
dead, and I have suffered — ^yes,
in a few minutes suffered more
than in all the rest of my life, in
the terrible agony of supernat-
ural fear.

If she had not spoken I might
have died ! But she did speak, in
a sad and gentle voice, which
made my nerves quiver. I cannot
say that I became master of my-
self and found my reason again.
No, I was so terrified that I no
longer knew what I did, but the
pride which I have, a pride of my
soldier’s trade, perhaps, made
me keep, in spite of myself, a re-
spectable appearance, both to
myself and to her, whatever she
was, woman or spectre. I thought
of this afterward, for I can tell
you that when it happened I
thought of nothing. I was simply
terror-stricken. She said:

“Oh, sir, you can do me a great
favor."

I tried to answer, but I could
not utter a word. An indistinct
noise came from my lips. She
spoke again:

“Will you? You can save me,
cure me. I suffer frightfully. I
suffer all the time. I suffer, oh ! I
suffer.”

And she sat slowly down in my
chair, looking at me.

“Will you?”

I motioned “Yes” with my

head, my voice being still para-
lyzed. Then she held out to me a
tortoise-shell comb and mur-
mured:

“Comb my hair, oh! comb my
hair. That will cure me. Some
one must do it. Look at my head !
How I suffer, and how badly my
hair is arranged!”

TTER unbound hair, very long
and black it seemed to me,
hung over the back of the chair
and touched the floor.

Why did I do it. Why did I
take the comb, shuddering, and
why did I take in my hands her
long hair which made me feel as
cold as if I were handling ser-
pents, I cannot tell.

That feeling has stayed in my
fingers, and I shiver to think of
it. I combed her hair. I touched —
I do not know how — those icy
tresses; I twisted and untwisted
them; I braided them as they
braid a horse’s mane. She sighed,
bent her head, and seemed happy.

Suddenly she said, “Thank
you,” took the comb from my
hands, and went out by the door
which I had noticed was half
open.

Left alone, I had for some sec-
onds the terrible fright which
one has after the nightmare.
Then I came to myself. I rushed
to the window and burst open the
shutters with a frightful blow.

Daylight flooded the room.

I sprang to the door through

AN APPARITION

which the Something had disap-
peared.

It was closed and locked.

Then a fever of flight seized
me, the true panic of battles, I
snatched the three bundles of let-
ters from the open desk, rushed
across the room, leaped down the
stairs four at a time, found my-
self outside, I knew not where,
and seeing my horse ten feet
away, bounded to his back and
galloped off, I did not draw rein
until I was in front of my lodg-
ings at Rouen, when, throwing
the bridle to my orderly, I fled to
my room and locked myself in.
Then for an hour I asked my-
self anxiously if I had not been
the victim of an hallucination.
Yes, I must have had one of those
strange nervous freaks which
give rise to miracles, and to
which the supernatural owes its
strength.

And I had come to believe it
was a vision, a deception of the
senses, when I happened to go
near the window.

My eyes accidentally fell on
my breast. My coat was covered
with hairs, long hairs of a wom-
an, which were caught around
the buttons. I took them one by
one, and threw them out of the
window with trembling fingers.
Then I called my orderly. I was

too much disturbed lo go to see
my friend that day, and besides,
I wanted to decide what I ought
to tell him. I sent him the letters,
for which he gave the soldier a
receipt. He asked a great many
questions about me.

They told him that I was suf-
fering, that I had had a sun-
stroke, that — I do not know
what.

He seemed uneasy.

vf # *

I went early the next morning
to see him, resolved to tell him
the truth.

He had gone out the evening be-
fore and had not returned. I
went again during the day, but
no one had seen him. I waited a
week. He did not appear.

Then I notified the authorities.
They searched for him every-
where, without discovering the
slightest trace of his flight.

A thorough search was made
of the deserted chateau, but no
discoveries were made.

There was no sign of a wom-
an’s having been concealed there.

The search amounting to noth-
ing, it was given up. And after
fifty-six years I have learned
nothing. I know no more.

THf END

FANTASTIC

OL Wet 3),

ung^eon — nraw

St.

Translated from "Les Morts Bizarres" of Jean Richeptn, by Walter Learned

A memorable short-short story of a man who knew the triumph
of the spirit. A fantasy at once gay, pathetic, humorous, tragic.

H e had passed his first ten
years in prison without do-
ing anything, settling himself and
fitting himself to the habits of
the place. Then, as there were
yet twenty years of prison life
before him, he said one fine
morning that it was shameful to
lead so idle a life, and that he
must create for himself some
occupation worthy, not of a free-
man, since he was a prisoner, but
worthy simply of a man.

He devoted a year to reflection,
to weighing the different ideas
which presented themselves, to
seeking a definite aim for his ex-
istence. To educate a spider, An
old story too well known. To
copy Pellico, indeed! A pure bit
of plagiarism. To count with his
fingers the rough places on the
wall. A ridiculous amusement,
useless and without appreciable
results.

“I must,” said he, "find some-
thing at the same time not,
useful, and defying. I must in-
vent a task which shall occupy

my time, which shall be produc-
tive of some good, and which
shall have the value of a protest.”
Another year was employed in
this search, and at last success
crowned his efforts.

It was a veritable dungeon,
that in which the prisoner lived,
which the sun entered but for one
short half-hour daily, and then
by a single ray which was a mere
thread of light. The bed on which
the unhappy man stretched his
aching limbs was a pile of wet
straw.

“The very thing,” he cried with
energy. “Now I shall defy my
jailers and cheat the courts.”

First he counted the separate
straws that made up his bundle.
These were one thousand three
hundred and seven straws. A
meagre bundle!

Then he made an experiment
to find out how long it would
take to dry a single straw. Three-
quarters of an hour. It would re-
quire for them all — for the one
thousand three hundred and sev-

en straws — a total of nine hun-
dred and eighty hours and fifteen
minutes, with a half hour of sun-
shine a day, nineteen hundred and
sixty-one days. Calculating that
the sun would not shine at least
one day out of three, it would re-
quire sixteen years, one month,
one week and six days. He set to
work at once.

E very day that the sun shone
the prisoner carried a straw
and put it in the sunshine, busy-
ing himself thus whenever there
was sun. For the rest of the time
he kept warm under his clothes
the straws which he had been
able to dry.

Thus ten years passed. The
prisoner slept on only a third of
the bundle of the damp straw,
and he had stuffed in the bosom
of his blouse the other two-thirds
which, one by one, he had dried.

Fifteen years passed. Happi-
ness unspeakable! Only one hun-
dred and twenty-six damp straws
remained.

Eighty-four days more, and
the prisoner could scarcely con-
tain himself. Proud of his work,
victor over circumstances, he
cried with the voice of an aveng-
er, with a mocking, rebellious
laugh ;

"Ah! ah! You condemned me
to the wet straw of a dungeon.
Well, weep with rage I I sleep on
dry straw.”

Alas ! Unfortunately a cruel

destiny was watching for its prey.

One night while the prisoner
dreamed of the happiness in
store for him, in his wild joy he
threw out his hands in speech-
less exultation, overset his wa-
ter-jug, and the water ran trick-
ling down his breast.

All of the straws were wet.

What to do now. To begin
again the toil of Sisyphus, To
pass fifteen years more putting
straws to dry in the slender ray ?

Oh, the discouragement of it!
You, the fortunate ones of the
world, who give up a pleasure if
twenty five steps are necessary
for its acquisition, dare you cast
at him the first stone?

But you say, he had only a
year and a half more in prison.

And do you count as nothing
wounded pride, fallen hope?
Think! this man would have
worked fifteen years to sleep on
a bundle of dry straw, and should
he consent to quit his prison with
wet straws clinging to his hair?
Never! One is either worthy or
unworthy.

Eight days and nights ne
writhed in agony, wrestling with
despair, striving for a foothold
in the ruin which overwhelmed
him.

He finished by losing his hold
and by acknowledging defeat. He
had lost the battle.

One evening he fell on his

FANTASTIC

kn^s, despairing and broken. I can bear it no longer.” Then in
”0 God,” he cried in his tears, a sudden access of indignation
“pardon me that I have lost cour- he cried :

,age today. I have suffered for “No, no, a thousand times no!
thirty years. I have felt my limbs It shall not be said that I have
waste, my skin mortify, my eyes lost my life for nothing. I will
grow dim and my hair and teeth not desert. I am not a coward,
fail me. I have resisted hunger. No, I will not sleep for a minute
thirst, cold, and solitude. I had more on the damp straw of the
a hope which sustained my ef- dungeon. No, they shall not de-
forts. I had an aim in my life, feat me.”

Now it is impossible to satisfy And the prisoner died during
my hope. Now the aim is gone the night, conquered like Brutus,
forever. Pardon me that I desert grand like Cato,
my post, that I quit the field of He died of an heroic indiges-
battle, that I flee like a coward, tion. He had eaten all his straw.

THE END

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All this and more on sale at newsstands March 7. Only 35^.

His Star

A Story told in the Chicago Journal by Austyn Granville

Illustrator COYE

From the pages of a long-dead newspaper
comes this quaint tale of
a stargazer’s delusion. Or was it?

M y name is Jules Bertraud.

I have lived in Paris all my
life. It is the first time that I
have ever been in conflict with
the police — the first time I have
ever been arrested. As my sanity
has been called in question, and
you, Monsieur Barbierre, justly
distinguished as an advocate,
have kindly undertaken to de-
fend me, I send you this truthful
history of the circumstances
which have led to my being thus
imprisoned as a lunatic.

I have purposely applied to you
to conduct my defense, as you
are not alone learned in the law ;
but have spent, like myself,
whole nights in studying the com-
plex systems of the stars, which
but yesterday were under my
feet, and to-night, as I write this
in my gloomy cell, shine so
brightly overhead.

Perhaps you may have never
noticed a small star of about the
thirtieth magnitude, which, on
very clear nights and with a pow-

erful telescope, may be discov-
ered almost midway between the
constellations of the Pleiades
and Ursa Major. It is the com-
paratively insignificant star
called Perigo. It has a Portu-
guese name, an ominous one, sig-
nifying “peril,” “hazard,” “jeop-
ardy.” It is my natal star. Bom
under its direful influence, I have
been subjected to it ever since.
My father, who was, as you
know, a celebrated astronomer,
has calculated that its orbit is so
vast that it takes it nearly fifty
years to complete it. His last
words to me were: “Beware of
Perigo when in perihelion. It will
then iwssess its greatest power
over you for evil. What effect it
may have upon you at that time
it is impossible to surmise;
something, however tells me that
it will materially charge not
only your mental but your physi-
cal being.

That warning was uttered fif-
teen years ago. I have never for-

gotten it. Pursuing, like my fath-
er, the study of astronomy, I was
enabled to watch through the
long nights the steady, irresisti-
ble aj)proach of that fateful star
which was to have such an influ-
ence upon my destiny.

You are well aware how I have
struggled against it. Sometimes
I have dreaded that it would
tempt me to the commission of
some fearful^ crime. Dwelling on
this, what wonder if my mind
should have assumed a morbid
cast? But I am not insane.

I could conflde in no one. You,
the successful advocate, and I,
the obscure astronomer, had not
then been linked in the bonds of
friendship through our simultan-
eous discovery of a new planet.
My wife’s relatives, ever on the
watch to secure some pretext for
her separation from a man who
brought her but little fortune, I
could not trust. Even from my
wife herself I concealed my grow-
ing, appalling apprehensions. It
is perilous to confide a secret to
woman.

T WO weeks ago I insensibly
became aware of the near ap-
proach of my natal star to that
great center of the solar system
which ordinary men call the sun,
but which to us is merely one of
many planets around which sys-
tems of far greater immensity
than ours revolve. It was then
that I set myself to a calculation

of the exact time when, in ac-
cordance with the inexorable
laws of nature, the star Perigo
would attain its perihelion with
the sun of our system. A long
series of calculations had assured
me of the fact that at or about
midnight of the 17th of October,
Perigo would be in the zenith.

A prey to the profoundest ap-
prehensions, I at ten o’clock that
night bade my wife good-night,
and, stooping over the cradle of
our youngest-born, imprinted
upon its forehead what I thought
might be perhaps my farewell
kiss. I then shut myself in my
study, closed the door tightly,
and sat down to wait, unaided
and alone, the coming of the fate-
ful moment.

To divert my mind as much as
possible from thoughts of the im-
I)eding disaster which I felt cer-
tain was about to overwhelm me,
I plunged at once into the solu-
tion of a problem which had al-
ready caused me many sleepless
nights. While thus engaged, over-
come with fatigue of watching, I
sank into a profound slumber I
dreamed that I had been suddenly
taken very sick; that physicians
had been called in ; that I had died
and had been stretched out upon a
board for the purposes of an
autopsy. The hardness of the bed
upon which I had thus been laid
disturbed my slumbers. I awoke,
rubbed my eyes, and sat up. I
did not at first realize where I

FANTASTIC

was, or the extraordinary things
which had happened to me. I
looked around. It was the same
room in which I had gone to sleep.
The pai>er on the wall was the
same, to the very pattern. But
the room had been stripped of
furniture, even to the carpet,
and the floor had been white-
washed. How long had I been
asleep? I stood up and walked to
the window. I had left the top of
it open for ventilation. My study,
as you know, is a very lofty room.
Whoever had divested it of furni-
ture had also closed the window
at the top. To compensate for this
he had opened it at the bottom
I leaned over the sill and looked
out. The stars were shining far
away below me ; yet the noises of
the street, which are never absent
in Paris, no matter how late the
hour, fell distinctly upon my ear.
Again I glanced below, complete-
ly mystified. There, shining in
the azure depths, were the silver,
twinkling stars, the familiar
companions of my vigils. The
earth seemed to have melted be-
neath my feet.

A dreadful feeling now took
possession of me. Trembling vio-
lently, I fell upon my knees upon
the hard, whitewashed floor and
prayed fervently. I shut my eyes
to keep out the horrid visions
which oppressed me. Was I going
mad ? By degrees I became calm-
er. I opened my eyes and cast
them heavenward, and the next

moment had sprung to my feet
again, staggering back, open-
mouthed, wild-eyed, appalled.
Above me, not forty feet away,
was the pavement of the street
in which I resided. Upon its
stony surface men and wom-
en walked, head downward, in the
air, and vehicles of all kinds
passed by me in a singular pro-
cession, the quadrupeds engaged
in drawing them appearing like
flies on an exaggerated ceiling.

Still I did not comprehend.
While my mental faculties re-
mained unimpared, my brain
was slow to appreciate the mar-
vellous change which had taken
place in my physical constitu-
tion. It was not until I withdrew
my head from the window and
glanced upward that I began,
faintly at first, but soon with all
the intensity of my being, to
realize that prodigious thing
which had happened to me.

the ceiling of the room, all
the furniture of the apart-
ment was arrayed precisely as I
had left it two hours before when
I had fallen asleep. There was the
desk with the inkstand into
which I had dipped my pen. There
was my heavy arm-chair, my
stove, a ponderous weight, which
I wondered did not fall and
crush me; my bookcase filled
with books. Amazed, I looked at
-all these things. Even the cat
slumbered on the hearth rug.

HIS NATAL STAR

How did she do it, seemingly
holding on to nothing, in a cham-
ber which had been literally
turned upside down?

Then suddenly an awful
thought flashed across me. In-
stinctively I pulled out my watch,
holding it open in my hand. To
my amazement it slipped from
me and like a balloon rose to the
level of my chin. I caught it and
pulled it down. It was just at the
strike of midnight.

It was the fateful hour. Perigo
was in perihelion.

Brought under its tremendous
influence, the pitiful attraction
of the earth had been easily over-
come. What my father had dread-
ed and dimly foreseen had come
to pass. Henceforth I was re-
leased from the influence of the
earth. The gravity of Perigo, in
my single instance, was all-pow-
erful. Like a flash the real state
of the case darted through my
mind. I, not the earth, nor the
house upon the earth, nor the
room within that house, but I,
Jules Bertraud, was walking up-
side down.

My soul was seized with a sud-
den panic. Rapidly I walked up
and down the ceiling. As I
moved, coins, keys, and various
articles fell rattling from my
pockets. A five-franc silver piece
struck against the lamp. If it
had broken it I could not have
descended to extinguish the
flames. Heat ascends. It was stif-

ling where I was, notwithstand-
ing the open window, near which,
indeed, now realizing the awful
influence of the star, I did not
dare to venture, fearing that a
false step might percipitate me
into those tremendous depths
that, like a fathomless ocean,
gleamed beneath me.

I took off my coat and laid it
upon the whitewashed floor. The
moment I took my hands from it
it arose rapidly and struck
against the carpeted ceiling. The
cat woke up and ran and nested
in it. I cried “Shush ! Shush !” It
looked up or down — whichever is
right — and ran under the desk,
fearful lest I might fall and
crush it. I, on my part, stood
staring stupidly and wondering
why it did not fall into my out-
stretched arms.

I experienced no unpleasant
consequences, physically, from
my novel situation. My body,
however, seemed to have grown
much lighter. It seemed as if I
could not weigh more than fifty
pounds. My blood flowed natural-
ly in its channels. I was feverish,
but that was from the heat of the
chamber. I leaned out of the win-
dow and felt the cool breeze upon
my fevered cheek. I gazed again
into the eternal depths below.
There, midway between the Bear
and the Pleiades, was my natal
star. I had but to leap from the
window to be carried at once to-
ward it. Of what interest I might

FANTASTIC

be to science if I could reach it!
But I should never return, or if I
did, it would be when Perigo had
passed its perihelion and then I
should be hurled back to earth
a shapeless, indistinguishable
mass.

I BECAME seized with a sudden
desire to leave my study. I
walked over to the door, but it
was far above my head. The tran-
som, however, was open; by a
desperate spring I reached it,
drew myself up easily, and
crawled through. Arrived on the
other side, I hung for a moment
by my hands and then let go. It
would have been dark but for the
moon, whose mellow light came
through the glass roof of a cov-
ered passageway against which
I had dropped. Had I been of nor-
mal weight I must have crushed
through, and then nothing could
have saved me ; but as it was, the
thick glass roof of the passage-
way easily sustained me.

I was moved by an indefinable
instinct to go forward. You
may think it was a curious jour-
ney, thus to be wandering around
one’s own house upside down,
walking along the ceilings; but
the world to me was upside down,
and the only thing that appeared
to me to be at all ridiculous was
the fact that the earth, the hous-
es, and the people in them were
all upside down. I wondered how
the people could breathe, and

why those houses, horses, and
carriages did not detach them-
selves and fall into the deep
abyss.

I reached the end of the hall
and passed out on to the ceiling
of the stairs. I worked myself
down to the wall of the staircase,
looking up every now and then
at the pattern of the carpets. I
crossed the hall, stumbling
against the chandelier. Several of
the crystals were detached and
fell to the pavement with a loud
crash.

Pierre, the butler, who always
sleeps in the little room to the
right of the hall, woke up and
came out, candle in hand, rub-
bing his eyes sleepily. I trem-
bled with fear, and dared not
move while he went through the
rooms with his pistol, looking for
robbers. At length he satisfied
himself and returned to his
chamber.

I now desired to escape from
the house. The hall door was en-
tirely beyond my reach; but
again I could have resort to the
transom. If I could only reach the
railings outside I might work my
way along them until I met some
one. I felt an inextinguishable
longing to be with you, the only
man to whom I could explain my
strange case, and of whose sym-
pathy I could be certain.

With much effort I forced the
transom, and creeping through,
I hung for a moment by my

HIS NATAL STAR

hands. I dared not look down in-
to the fathomless abyss. A single
glance would have destroyed me.
Wisely I forebore, and commenced
to climb up in the direction of the
street railing. The inequalities in
the woodwork and my light
weight favored me. The next in-
stant my hand grasi>ed the iron.
I drew myself up until my head
touched the stone coping, and
planting my feet upon the orna-
mented finish of the fence, I
worked my way along the street.

I T WAS now nearly two in the
morning, and I am satisfied
that I should have reached your
door in safety if I had not, in
turning the corner, had the mis-
fortune to be espied by a police-
man. This man, as you know, see-
ing me standing on my head,
thought me a maniac. He called
up another policeman, and de-
spite my entreaties I was carried
off to the station. Being turned
around what they thought was
the right way, despite my at-
tempts at explanation, in the
hands of these ignoramuses, I
narrowly escaped suffocation.

Conducted to the police station,
they threw me into a cell, where
I fell with such force against the
ceiling that I lost my senses.
When restored to consciousness
two hours later I found myself
sitting up on the floor. The in-
fluence of Perigo had passed. I
was again subordinate to the law
of terrestrial gravity.

This, my dear Monsieur Bar-
bierre, is a brief outline of my
adventures. To you, who know
my family history and the vin-
dictiveness of my wife’s rela-
tives, I make this confession. As
a man who reveres the truth and
knows the incredulity of the pub-
lic, you will see the futility of
stating the exact facts in the
case. I should never be believed.
Worse, should I publish what I
have here written, I should un-
doubtedly be adjudged insane.

I beg of you to exert, there-
fore, your inexhaustible ingenu-
ity in rescuing your brother sci-
entist from his present predica-
ment without betraying his
secret. Do this, and forever de-
serve the gratitude of your de-
voted friend, Jules Bertraud.

THE END

FANTASTIC

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NINE STARSHIPS

WAITING

ROGER

ZELAZNY

"The tiger is loose," it said.

He folded the message and placed it beneath a paperweight.
“You may go.”

The man before him saluted sharply and did an about-face.
The Duke did not look up.

He reached for a cigar and leaned back into his chair,

“The tiger is loose,” he said, “after all these years . , .”

He lighted it and stared for a long while into the blue haze.
“1 wonder what he’ll look like, this time?”

L -vsJ

^-1

\ '^*'>'!K'JiSnM

BjljfjlM

■r^UIH!

MINUS TEN

E was awake.

For a long while he did
not open his eyes. He thought of
his arms and his legs and they
were there. He tried to decide
what he was, but he could not
remember.

He began to shiver.

He felt a thin covering above
his nude body. A draft of cold air
was chilling his face.

He shook his head. Then he
was on his feet, and dizzy.

He looked about.

A candle flickered on the ta-
ble, beside a muddied skull. To
the right lay a dagger.

He looked back at his bed. It
was a coffin, the coverlet a shroud.
Black-draped walls leaned to-
ward him, the hangings gently a-
rustle. There was a mirror on the
farthest wall, but he did not feel
like looking into it. There was no
door.

“You are alive," said the voice,
"I know,” he answered.

“Look into the mirror."

“Go to hell.”

He stalked about the room,
bunching the hangings together
and tearing them loose, yards at
a time. Ankle-deep in black velvet,
he smashed the mirror.

“Pick up a piece of the mirror
and look at yourself.”

“Go to hell!”

“Do you know what you will
see?”

He snatched the dagger from
the table and began shredding
the velvet into long ribbons.

“You will see a man," it con-
tinued, “a naked, useless man.”

He hurled the skull across the
room and it shattered against the
wall.

“You will see a pitiful crawling
worm, a hairless embryo, a fork
of stripped willow; you will see a
poor player, strutting and fret-
ting. . . .”

He heaped the shredded cloth
in the center of the cell and set
fire to it with the candle. He
pushed the table into the blaze.

“You know you are at the
mercy of the elements you seek to
control. . . .”

The hairs on his chest withered
and curled. He glared upwards.

“Come down here,” he invited,
“whatsoever thou art, and this
shall be thy pyre!”

Somewhere above him he heard
a muffied click. The voice ceased.
He threw his dagger high and it
struck metal.

It dropped back into the flames.

If I be so damn6d weak, what
fearest thou?” he cried. “Come
visit me in hell!”

The candle flickered out as a
mist of fire foam descended. The
bonfire persisted a moment long-
er, and the glowing table was last
to vanish.

Silently, the nozzles in the wall
sucked away his consciousness.

He fell across his coffin.

FANTASTIC

“How’s he doing now, sir?”

“Mean as ever,” said Channing.

The new Assistant Director
studied the screen.

“Is he really everything they
say ?”

“Depends on what you’ve
heard.’’

Channing adjusted the cell’s
thermostat to 68“ Farenheit and
switched on the recorder.

“If you’ve heard that he sank
the Bismarck,’’ he continued, “he
did not. If you’ve heard that he
assassinated Trotsky, he did not.
He wasn’t around then — but he
thinks he was, and he thinks he
did. But if you think that New
Cairo vanished in a natural dis-
aster, or that General Kenton
died of food poisoning, you’re
wrong.”

The new Assistant shuddered
and unhooked an earphone. He
listened to the words broadcast
at the anesthetized' man.

“.' . . You are death and dam-
nation in human form. You are
the lightning of Nemesis attract-
ed by mortal rods. You assassin-
ated Lincoln. You killed Trotsky
— split his skull like a melon. You
pulled the trigger at Sarajevo
and smashed the seals of the
Apocalypse. You are the poisoned
blade that bled the Court of Den-
mark, the bullet in Garfield, the
steel in Mercurtio — and the fires
of vengeance burn in your soul
forever. — You are Vindici, the
son of Death. , .

It droned on and on, in a flat
matter-of-fact tone. The Assist-
ant Director hung the earphone
back on the board and looked
away from the Gothic setting on
the screen.

“You fellows are rather thor-
ough about these things, aren’t
you ?”

Channing snorted what might
pass for a chuckle.

“Thorough?” he asked. “He
is the only complete success
we’ve ever had. Over the past
nineteen years he has been re-
sponsible for more mayhem than
any tidal wave or earthquake in
history.”

“Why all the rhetoric?”

“He’s a character out of a
play.”

The Assistant shook his head
and shrugged.

“When can I talk to him?”

“Give us three more days,” an-
swered Channing. “It’s still feed-
ing time.”

* * *

Cassiopeia looked up from her
balcony at the four new stars. On
another planet, which she had
never visited, a similar forma-
tion would have been called the
Southern Cross. The constella-
tion above her bore no name,
however, and the four points of
the cross had once blazed from
man-made hearths on four sepa-
rate worlds. — Steel rood of the
forges, its arms did not wink like
stars.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

Gray-eyed, she watched till
they were out of sight. Turning,
green-eyed, she entered her apart-
ments, with hair of tiger gold
and cloak of tiger black.

And she wondered, behind her
changing eyes — Who would come
to tear down the cross over
Turner’s World?

When she thought she knew
she cried herself to sleep.

MINUS NINE

The world of Stats’ a drunk-
en bat;

It waggles to and fro.

How it avoids the asteroids,

Only God and the Statmen
know.

And who it was that ivrit
these lines

Where the cool flushtank
flows,

And why he cannot leave
this place,

Only Statcom knows.

— Carl Smythe, Sp. Asst. Dr.
Channing, identity deter-
mined Statcom Code 11-7,
Word Order Analysis.

S he coherent yet?”

“If you mean will he under-
stand you, yes. The term ‘coher-
ency’, however, does not apply.”

“What do you mean?”

“His mind is not a coherent
whole in any psychiatric sense.
He is two personalities— Hjne
aware only of itself, and the other
of both selves.”

“Schizoid?” the Assistant Di-
rector asked, matter of factly.

“No. Neo-Kraepelinian typol-
ogy doesn’t apply.”

“Which one will I be talking
to?”

“The one we need.”

“Oh.”

Smythe, who had been rum-
maging in a drawer, turned to
them with a grin. He caressed a
laser-gun the size of an auto-
matic pencil, then slipped it into
his breast pocket.

“You won’t be needing that,”
said the Assistant Director. He
reached behind his belt and with-
drew a compact pistol.

"Small, but deadly,” he smiled.

“Yes, I know,” said Channing.
“Give it to me.”

“What do you mean ‘give it to
you’? I’m going to be talking to
a psychopathic killer. I want a
gun of my own.”

“The hell you say! You’re not
going in there with that thing !”

With grizzled crewcut, patches
of scalp showing through, por-
cine features, and his short,
stocky build. Doctor Karol Chan-
ning resembled nothing so much
as a razorback hog.

He held forth a wide hand.

The Assistant dropi>ed his
eyes, then placed his gun in the
outstretched palm.

“Since Smythe is armed, I
guess it’s all right. . . .”

Channing grinned.

“He’s not your bodyguard.”

100

FANTASTIC

"Smythe! Damn it! I want a
drink!”

“You’re leaving tomorrow,
Vindici. Do you want a big head
when the hyper-drive cuts in?"

"Damn the h.d. ! and damn my
head tomorrow! It’s my stomach
I’m thinking of now!” A wheed-
ling note crept into his voice. "Be
a good fellow and fetch us a bot-
tle.”

Smythe’s freckled face twisted,
then split.

“Okay, dad, it’s your frame.
You're my charge till you leave,
and keeping you happy is part of
the job description. Hold the fort.
I’ll be back.”

Smythe ducked out the door of
the apartment and Vindici noted
with pleasure that he did not
lock it behind him. He shook his
head. Why should that thought
have occurred to him? He was no
prisoner. He crossed to the mir-
or and studied himself.

A little under six feet, a little
underweight — but that always
happens in the sleep tanks — black
hair with flecks of white at the
temples, mahogany eyes, straight
nose, firm chin.

The man in the mirror wore an
expensively-cut gray jacket and
a light blue shirt.

He rubbed his eyes. For a mo-
ment the reflection had been
blond and green-eyed, with fuller
lips and darker skin.

He raised the water tumbler be-
tween the thumb and index fin-

ger of his delicate right liand.
He squeezed until it shattered.
The pieces fell into the bowl.

He smiled back at his reflec-
tion.

The door opened behind him
and Smythe entered with an al-
most-full fifth of Earth bourbon
and two glasses.

“Good thing you brought an
extra glass. I just broke mine.”

“Oh? Where is it?”

“In the bowl. Bumped it.”

“I’ll clean it out. That,”
frowned Smythe, “is also in my
job description.”

Vindici smiled mechanically
and filled both glasses. He
downed his in a gulp and refilled
it.

Smythe dumped the shards in-
to the disposal slot.

“How you feeling?” he said.

Vindici added ice, then took
another drink.

“Fine — now.”

Smythe finished washing his
hands and dropped into a chair.

“Damn! I cut myself!”

Vindici chuckled.

“Blood!”

He sighed, and continued,
. . The most beautiful thing
in the universe, cloistered in the
darkest places possible and blush-
ing most admirably when ex-
posed.”

S MYTHE wrapped it in his
handkerchief, hastily.

“Yeah. Sure.”

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

101

“Furthermore — " said Vindici.

“Have you got all the tjrpogra-
phy straight?"

“Yes, I used to live there."

“Hm. Well—”

“Yes. I did live there, didn’t
I? Or was it Captain Ramsay?
— Sure, Turner’s Guard. He was
an officer.”

“That’s right, but that was
long ago. I was a kid.”

Vindici took another drink.

“And I’m going to kill some-
one. I won’t know who until I get
there. But I wanted to kill —
someone — then — ”

He looked at Smythe.

“Do you know why I’m going?"

“Nope. I’m just the garbage
man.”

He passed his hand before his
eyes.

“That’s not true,” he said. “I
see a centaur. . . .You are a man
from the waist up and a bank of
machinery below. . . .”

Smythe laughed nervously.

“My girl back home would be
surprised to hear that — don’t
tell her. But seriously, why are
you going?”

Vindici shook his head.

“Eagles over Nuremberg.”

“Huh?”

“Starships — ^battle conches —
are gathering at Turner’s
World.”

Smythe shrugged.

“What do we care if they take
the place ? In fact, it would be
a good idea.”

The dark man shook his head.

"They’re not there to take the
place.”

Smythe halted his drink in
mid-movement.

"Oh. How often have we
smashed Turner’s World?” he
mused. “At least three times in
the past sixty years. Won’t they
ever give up?”

Vindici’s chuckle made him
check to see whether he had
swallowed one of his ice cubes.

“Why should they?” asked the
other. “The Fed would never
sanction out-and-out destruction
of Turner’s World. It might make
too many neutrals cease being
neutral. So they just de-fang it
every twenty years or so.

“One day,” he smiled, “the den-
tist will arrive too late.”

“What’s your part in all this?
You’re a Turnerian, you fought
the Federation. . , .”

“I’m the dentist,” growled
Vindici, “and I hate the place!
It’s a violation of Fed Code to
station more than two conches
within five light years of one an-
other. A world can only own a
maximum of two.”

“And Turner’s World has none
— Article Nine of the last war
settlement,” supplied Smythe,
“but they can quarter two.”

“Four have already arrived,”
said Vindici. “Six would consti-
tute a first class Emergency.
Statcom says there will be at
least seven.”

102

FANTASTIC

Smythe gulped hia drink.

Six conches could destroy six
worlds, or hold them. At least six
worlds. . . .

“From where?” he asked.

“The Pegasus, from Opiuchus
— the Stilleto, from Bran — the
Standback, from Deneb — and the
Minotaur.”

“Then the Graf Spec and the
Kraken may be on their way.”

Vindici nodded.

“That’s what Statcom thinks.”

“Could a simple assassination
stop them?”

“Statcom thinks so — but an
assassination is never simple. I
may have to kill the whole High
Command, whoever they are.”

Smythe winced.

“Can you do it?”

Vindici laughed.

“That world killed me once,
which was a mistake. They
should have let me live.”

Then they killed the bottle, and
Smythe hunted up another. As
they became the hub of the gal-
axy, with lopsided universes spin-
ning about them, Smythe re-
membered asking, “Why, Vindi-
ci ? Why are you the weapon that
walks like a man?”

The next morning he could not
remember the answer, except that
part of it was an Elizabethan
monologue delivered to an empty
bottle, beginning, “My study’s
ornament, thou shell of death
. . .” and punctuated with nu-
merous “ ’sblud’s”, before the

man had collapsed, sobbing,
across the bedstead — and he
could not find him to say good-
bye, because Vindici had blasted
off at 0600 hours, for Turner's
World. But it did not really mat-
ter to Smythe.

MINUS EIGHT

A re you the one?”

“Yes.”

“Name me the place.”

“Stat."

“Name me the time.”

“Any.”

“Come in.”

Vindici entered quickly and
surveyed the room. It held the
normal furnishings of a provin-
cial hotel, untouched, save for a
heaped ashtray.

Vindici inspected the closet and
the small washroom.

“There’s no one under the bed
either.”

Vindici looked.

“You’re right.”

He eyed the slender man with
the nervous tic and the hair too
dark for what there was of it.
“You’re Harrison. ”

He nodded.

“You’re Vindici.”

He smiled.

“I’ve come to kick those four
stars out of the sky before they
have puppies. What’s the word?”
“Sit down.”

“I can listen standing up.”
Harrison shrugged. He seated
himself.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

103

“Turner’s World has always
been the catalyst. The Opiuchu-
ans and the Denebians are ready.
The Eighth Reich will have two
conches here by tonight. They
don’t trust each other, but they’ve
agreed upon Duke Richard as
command — ’’

“Richard !’’ Vindici took a step
forward, hands raising.

Harrison stared into his eyes,
unmoving, except for the left cor-
ner of his mouth which jerked
like the wing of a moth.

Finally, he nodded.

“Richard de Tourne. He’s old,
but he’s still vicious and cun-
ning.’’

Vindici spat upon the carpet
and stamped on it. A slow meta-
morphosis began to unwind his
saturnine features.

His cheekbones lowered and his
lips began to swell, the streaks of
white at his temples grew yellow.

“Your eyes!’’ Harrison ex-
claimed. “They’re changing, Vin-
dici!’’

The man shrugged off the jack-
et which had grown too tight
across his shoulders. He threw
it the length of the room.

“Who’s Vindici?’’ he asked.
* •* »

F ifty cubic miles of steel and
plastic, like a quarterback run-
ning a broken field, Stat.

Steel dancing through bliz-
zards of rock, with an infallible
pilot, Statcom,

Statcom, charting possible fu-

tures and their remedies. Stat
did not exist, because Statcom
had debunked the rumors of it-
self two generations ago. Fed had
no weapon for first class Emer-
gencies other than diplomacy or
military force — Statcom had
said so.

Channing found Smythe in the
Armory of Forbidden Weapons,
fondly studying a 1917 trench
knife.

“He’s arrived,’’ said Channing.

The lanky redhead replaced the
knife on the rack.

“Why tell me?’’

“Thought you might like to
know.”

“Meet Harrison yet?”

“Should have.”

“Good. Thanks to your work
he is now Captain Ramsay, which
is even better than being Vindici,
for the moment.”

“Sir?”

A long second passed as
Smythe studied the trench knife.

“Statcom said you’d guess
sooner or later today. It didn’t
pinpoint the hour, though.”

“I know. I asked it after I fig-
ured things out.”

“Congratulations, you’ve just
won yourself a free brainwash
and an all-expense trip home.”

“Good, I hate this place.”

“When did you learn?”

“I’ve suspected you were the
Director for some time now.
You’ve always protested more
loudly then anyone else about

104

FANTASTIC

conditions here. You tipped your
hand, though, by having Statcom
override sound therapy and rec-
ommend that you get drunk with
Vindici. You always were fasci-
nated by weapons.”

‘‘I’ll have to watch that in the
future,” laughed Smythe, ‘‘and
I’ll have Statcom chart the per-
iodicity of my complaints. You
always were pretty sharp when it
came to minds, though — human
or mechanical.”

“Which are you?”

“I’m a part of Stat,” he an-
swered, “and I’m writing history
before it happens, in a book no
one will ever read and tell of
— author unknown.”

“You’re mad,” said Channing.

“Of course. I’m drunk as Di-
onysius, and dedicated as the
three old women with the spin-
ning wheels — and as omnipotent.
When you return to your quar-
ters the medmen will be waiting.”

Channing eyed the rack of
knives.

“I could kill you right now, if
I had a little more cause. But
what you’re doing may be right.
I just don’t know.”

“I know,” answered Smythe,
“and you never will.”

Channing’s shoulders sagged.

“What part will my poor im-
poster play in all this?”

“The most difficult of all, of
course — himself.”

Smythe turned his back and
studied a gigantic Catalan knife.

“Go to hell,” muttered Chan-
ning.

He might have heard a metal-
lic chuckle as he left the Armory.

MINUS SEVEN

A nd you don’t think he’ll rec-
ognize you?” asked Harri-
son.

“With a white beard and a
bald dome? I’m dead, remember?”

“Richard isn’t senile — arid he’ll
probably be expecting something
like this.”

“I’ll be working for his son,
Larry. He was an infant the last
time I saw him. Richard won’t
even see me, until the last thing.”

Ramsay looked across the great
courtyard. A square mile of lush
vegetation, an artificial lake, a
row of summer cottages, and a
small menagerie lay beneath him.
Servants were clearing the re-
mains of an all night party from
about a huge pavillion. Broken
dishes were confetti upon the
grass, and pieces of cloth deco-
rated the branches of trees.
Slow-moving men with rubbish
sacks were insects far below,
gathering up everything in sight.
The greenly lowering sun was
balanced like a gigantic olive atop
the forty-foot wall which en-
closed the estate.

Something came loose at the
bottom of his brain.

“Where have I been all this
time ? It seems so very long since
I lived in the officers’ quarters.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

105

there,” he pointed, “across the
lake. Was I very ill?”

“The sleep,” said Harrison. "It
was long. There was no antidote
for the poison Richard used, so
your friends put you in the sleep
tanks until one could be devel-
oped.”

“How long was I out?”

“Nineteen years.”

Ramsay closed his eyes and
touched his forehead. Harrison
clapped him on the shoulder.

"Don’t think about it now.
Your mind is still recovering
from the shock. You want to get
this thing over with first, don’t
you ?”

“Yes, that’s right I do.
Larry is a man now . . .”

“Of course — a baby wouldn’t
be hiring a pimp, would he ?”

Ramsay laughed, and his eyes
matched the color of the sun.

“A pimp! How royal! How
grand and fitting!”

His laughter became demented.
It rolled and echoed about the
high hall.

Harrison coughed loudly.

“Perhaps you had better — ^uh
— compose yourself. He’ll be here
soon, and you should be proper-
ly subservient.”

He sobered, but a smile con-
tinued to play about the corners
of his mouth.

“All right. I’ll spend the next
five minutes thinking of money
and sex. I’ll save this for later — ”

His right hand darted behind

his back and up beneath the hem'
of his jacket.

Simultaneously, there was a
blurring movement and a click.

Harrison looked cross-eyed at
the switch blade touching his
Adam’s Apple. He licked his lips.

“Excellent form — but please
put it away. What if Larry were
to walk in here and see — ?”

“Then this would happen,” he
replied, without moving his lips.

The blade was gone again.

“Very impressive.” Harrison
swallowed half of the last word.

“It will stay put now, until
bleeding time.”

They lighted cigarettes and
waited.

T he door finally opened, sound-
lessly, behind Ranuay. He
turned, nevertheless, smirking at
the thin-faced boy who stood
upon the threshold.

The youth looked through him
and into Harrison.

“Is he the man?”

“He is.”

“What’s his name?”

“Pete.”

“Pete, I’m Leonard de Tourne,
first heir of this damned amuse-
ment park.” He walked past them
and hurled himself into an easy
chair so hard that it banged
against the wall. He wiped his
moist forehead on a silken sleeve
and crossed his legs. His dark
eyes focussed on Ramsay. “I
want a woman,” he announced.

106

FANTASTIC

Ramsay chuckled out loud.

“That’s easily accomplished.”

The boy ran many-ringed lin-
gers through his thatch of un-
ruly black. He shook his head.

“No, it isn’t. I want a woman,
not just any woman.”

“Oh, a special transaction.”

“That’s right, and the price is
no object.”

Ramsay rubbed his chemically-
wrinkled hands together.

“Good ! Good ! I like challenges
— and big commissions.”

“You’ll be well paid.”

“Excellent ! What’s her name?”

“Cassiopeia.”

The green-gray eyes squinted.

“Unusual name.”

"She’s the human daughter of
two dead hallies, and very beau-
tiful. Her father was part native
and her mother was an orphan
from God knows where. When
they’re fertile, those hybrid types
produce either lovely children or
freaks — or lovely freaks.

“Her mother was a servant girl
named Gloria,” he finished, “and
her father was an officer in the
Guard — I forget his name."

Ramsay nodded, then looked
away.

“Where does she live?”

“In an apartment building in
town. She owns it. Both parents
died at the same time, and my
father endowed the child. I don’t
know why.”

“Give me the address and I’ll
see her directly.”

“Good.” His lips curved into a
half-smile and he pulled a wrin-
kled envelope from his pocket.

“That’s the address on the out-
side. Inside is money.”

Ramsay opened it and counted.

“She must be very desirable.”

“Use as much as you have to,
and keep the rest for your fee. I
want her this week — tonight, if
possible. I'll give you a note so
that you can come and go as you
choose, in this part of the palace.
But don’t try to cross me! The
world isn’t big enough for anyone
to hide from a Tourne.”

Ramsay bowed, very low. His
voice wavered and, for a moment,
held Vindici’s deep resonance.

“True to my profession, m’lord
— I have never failed an assign-
ment.”

* * *

The moon hurled down spears
of silver. The six racing stars
darting between them were a
three-headed dragon with a long
tail.

Cassiopeia looked away.

The tiger’s tread was on the
stair behind her violet eyes. In
the marble garden of Medusa Per-
seus sleeps in stone . . .

MINUS SIX

G eneral Comstock stared at
the purple-veined nose, then
shifted his gaze to the tip of
Richard’s cigar.

“They may try to assassinate
you . . .” he began.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

107

“Not ‘may’,” corrected the
Duke. “ ‘Will.’ "

The Denebian’s eyes widened.

“You have heard a rumor?”

The Duke shook his head and
passed him the message he had
received earlier.

“Not a rumor,” he stated, "a
fact. Stat is sending Vindici.”

Comstock tugged his goatee
and read the brief sentence.

“I didn't think Stat really ex-
isted.”

“Fed has done a good coverup
job — good enough to fool anyone.
But I know that Stat exists be-
cause I know Vindici exists.”

“I’ll buy Stat,” said Comstock,
handing back the note, “but not
Vindici. When it comes to super-
man, there’s just no such animal.
Heroes, yes. Lucky fools, yes.
But don’t try to sell me a super-
man.”

“This is my last strike at the
Federation,” said Richard, after
a long pause. “Win, loose, or
draw, I die. The tiger is here on
Turner’s World and it’s just a
matter of time — because I killed
him when he was only a man.”

“Killed?”

“Killed. Stat knew what he was
then, and my failure to keep him
dead gave them the tiger. After
an hour and a half they dragged
him back from hell, and a man
named Channing created Vindici
from what was left.”

“What was he then?”

“A halfy. A genuine, fertile

halfy.” He touched the saint’s
ikon on his desk. “A soulless
cross between humanity and a
Turnerian native.”

“They’re telepaths, aren’t
they?”

Richard shrugged.

“Some are, others are other
things. But no one knows what a
man like Channing could do VTith
the mind of a broken halfy —
Channing certainly doesn’t
know.”

“Doctor Karol Channing, the
Adler of the twenty-third cen-
tury! Is he your man?”

“Of course. Who do you think
sent this message? He’s a ssTn-
pathizer, but like most academi-
cians he won’t go overboard for
revolution. He doesn’t even know
where Stat is, anyhow. All he did
was send me a message that I’m
going to die.”

“This place is built like Fed’s
gold vault.”

“So was Kenton’s HQ.”

Comstock crushed out his ciga-
rette in the huge pewter tray.

“It’s been rumored that he
didn’t reajly die of food poison-
ing. But still, the man took
chances.”

“Everyone takes chances — like
walking up a flight of stairs, like
eating food. The tiger is quite
real, he’s here in Cyril, and I have
no idea what he looks like. It’s
been close to nineteen years since
I’ve seen him. And halfies can
change shape,” he added.

108

FANTASTIC

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

109

“Just supposing he succeeds,”
asked Comstock, "have you any
plans?”

"My son, Larry, can take over.
You make the decisions, and he’ll
supply the name of Tourne. He’s
been briefed.”

"Very well, then that’s set-
tled. Can I lend you some body-
guards ?”

The Duke’s ruddy cheeks ex-
panded with his chuckle.

“When you leave, go through
the North Wing. Stop in the main
dining room and look at the wall.”

“What’s there?”

"Three words, in red chalk.”

“All right. I’ll take these maps
with me. I’ll be back this after-
noon.”

“Good morning.”

The General saluted and Rich-
ard returned it. The metal doors
slid open, soundlessly. He walked
past them and his bodyguards
headed toward the North Wing.

“Tonight,” said Richard, “in

Samarkand.”

•* * *

G ood morning, my lovely. You
have not changed. — Here,
in the tombs of ice, time does not
wither . . . Only . . . Only that
green mark of the kiss that stops
the heart. . . . Gloria ! I’m going
to see our daughter. That human
puppy of Tourne wants her. —
What’s that? — No, of course
not. But I must see her. I’d im-
agine she looks like you. — She is
either lovely, or a lovely freak.

he said. Like mother, like daugh-
ter, they say, and like father like
son. — Richard killed us when
you threw the wine in his face,
but I’m back. — Smashed form
releases chaos ; chaos smashes
other forms — rebound ! The pup-
py wants her, as the dog wanted
you, my fairest bitch. — Save
your tears of ice. I’ll reap two
souls and root the tree of Tur-
ner! — No! Wait for me. —
Save your icy spit for the souls
of Tournes, when they face you
— not far removed, but near . . .

“Good-bye, my lovely.”

MINUS FIVE

P ETE?”

“Yes, my lord?”

“I understand that my son
hired you because of your — er —
profession.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“I’m, well. I’m rather tense. Do
you know what I mean?”

“No, sir.”

"Hell! You’re as old as I am!
You know the feeling.”

“Sir?”

“Dammit! I’ve got an itch for
a woman and I want to be fixed
up! Is that plain enough?”
“Very clear.”

“Good. Here’s something for
your trouble. Get me a young one.”
“Where shall I bring her ?”
“That furthermost summer
cottage will be deserted.” He
pointed out the window. “Tonight,
say eleven o’clock?”

FANTASTIC

"She’ll be there with bells on.”

"Heh ! I’d prefer a little less.”

"Naked to the bone, my lord?”

"Not quite that far. Heh 1”

"True to my profession,
m’lord.”

Rather than take the elevator,
he climbed nine flights of stairs.
When he reached her door he
paused. It opened.

“Oh. I didn’t know there was
anyone . . .”

“I was about to knock.”

"I must have heard you on the
stair.”

"Must have.”

She stood aside and he walked
into the apartment, etching each
painted screen, each grass mat
and low table on the metal plate
at the bottom of his mind.

“Won’t you sit down?”

"Thank you.”

He fumbled for the envelope.

"You are Cassiopeia Ramsay?”

"Yes.”

“I’ve come from the Court of
Tourne.”

She stared into the Alcatraz of
his eyes. Dreamlike, the words
passed between them as they
watched each other, waves match-
ing colors on a sunny sea.

"Leonard, the son of Richard,
desires your presence in his
chambers. Tonight, if possible.”

“I see. What will happen ?”

Nothing.

“He wants to sleep with you.”

"Oh. And you are the royal —
factotum ?”

Why will nothing happen?
“Yes, and well paid. I’ve
brought you much money also.
Here.”

He will be dead.

“Very well, I’ll be there. What
time?”

“Say midnight.”

"Midnight,” she smiled.
Midnight.

When he left the seas became
chianti, and overflowing.

But Perseus of the glacier arm,
sword of ice .. . The sun is
burning bright!

Then, for the first time in many
years, she laughed.

» * *

C OMSTOCK’S Commandos

laced the darkness. A tug,
and their lines would tighten.

Anyone could enter. Nothing
could leave.

“You got the time, A1 ?”

“Ten till.”

Soot-barrelled laser rifles pro-
truding through ink-dipped
fronds. . . .

“Think anyone’ll come?”
“Naw.”

Fractional wattage; dim cot-
tage, still.

“What if Richard decides to
take a walk?”

“Don’t be the man he spots.
Comstock’s out on a limb.”

“Cripes, it’s the old man’s
neck! He oughta be grateful.”
"It’s not his order, so shut up.”
Stark, and the static of in-
sects. . . .

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

111

“Who’s that in the cottage?’’

“Dunno. So long as no one
comes out it don’t matter.”

“If they do?”

“We observe.”

Moist wind, the laughter of
thunder. . . .

“You bring a poncho?”

“Yeah, didn’t you?”

“Damn!”

Footsteps.

* *

Through jagged intermittances
of the Belt Stat sucked weight-
less quantities: words, from ev-
ersnvhere.

Three times a day Statcom took
thirty-second vacations from
heavier matters and translated
everything into mantalk — mil-
lions of units of mantalk. Then it
placed everything into categories
of importance.

When the Code-V prefix ap-
peared, it dropped all the other
words into screaming heaps in its
Pend-drum and uttered lights
the color of sucked cinnamon
drops.

The long tongue of paper rat-
tled at Smythe. He ceased his
manicuring and poked the nail-
file through it.

Raising it, he read.

Smiling, he let it fall again.

Having informed the forebrain
that Ramsay was about to die,
the cerebellum returned to chew-
ing its cud.

The cerebrum focussed its at-
tention on a thumbnail.

“. . . Palsy and ague,” an-
swered Ramsay, “that’s what’s
happening. Scream if you wish —
no one will hear you.”

“Dead. She is dead,” said Rich-
ard,

“Of course. You made her that
way, nineteen years ago. Remem-
ber?”

Ramsay put an arm around the
delicate shoulders. He turned the
seated woman, slowly.

“Gloria? Do you remember
Gloria?"

“Yes. Yes! I do! My throat is
burning !”

“Excellent! Wait till it hits
your lungs!”

“Who are you? You couldn’t
be—”

“But I am !”

His eyes blazed orange, and he
raised his arms over his head.
Like leaves, the years fell away.

“Captain Ramsay — Vindici !”

“Yes, it’s Ramsay,” he told
him. “I was going to use a knife,
but this way is better. You want-
ed to kiss her so badly a moment
ago — years ago. Badly enough to
kill her and her husband.”

The Duke began to gag.

“Be quick about your dying. I
must return her to the vaults and
finish another job.”

“Not my son !” he choked.

“Yes, old man — old, filthy, rot-
ten poisoner — and for the same
reason. You to my wife, he to my
daughter — and father and son in
double harness to hell!”

112

FANTASTIC

“He is young!” he cried out.

“So was Gloria. And so Cas-
siopeia. . , .”

The Duke screamed, one long
blade of a howl, broken off at the
end.

Ramsay looked away, mopping
his forehead.

“Die, damn you! Die!”

“Green lipstick,” muttered
Richard. “Green lipstick. . . .”

The walls splintered about
them, Ramsay whirled like a bat
passing through the blades of a
fan. He chopped the first man he
saw, across the throat. He
snatched his rifle and began fir-
ing.

Three men fell.

He leapt across a body and
stepped through the exploded
wall, firing first to his left and
then to his right.

A rifle butt caught him in the
back and he dropped to his knees.

Heavy boots began kicking at
his kidneys, his riba.

He curled into a ball, his hands
clasped behind his neck.

Before everything disappeared
he saw a candle, a skull, a dag-
ger, and a mirror.

* * *

H ello,” she said.

“Hello yourself. You’re

early.”

“A few minutes.”

“Couldn’t wait, eh?”

“You might say that.”

He walked around her, study-
ing. He patted her Tiips.

“You’re going to be all right,
girl. God ! Your eyes ! — I’ve never
seen eyes that color.”

“They change,” she told him.
“This is my happy color.”

He smirked, then touched her ;
hair, her cheek. . . .

“Well, let’s get real happy.”

He pulled her to him, fumbling
for the clasps at the back of her
dress.

“You’re warm,” he said, push-
ing the straps off her shoulders.
“Real warm.”

Without releasing her, he
leaned back and turned off the
main light.

“Makes things more co^. Me,
I like atmosphere — What was
that?”

“A scream,” she smiled.

He pushed her away and ran
to the window.

“Must have been some damned
bird,” he said after awhile.

She shrugged off the rest of
her clothing and stood swaying
in the dim light, with hair of
tiger gold and penetrating eyes'
of tiger black. ...

“That was the Duke, your fath-
er,” she told him, softly. "You
have just succeeded to the title.!
Long live Duke Larry! — at least!
till midnight.”

He turned, his back against thci
sill.

“Take a long, last look. The
vaults of ice are lonely.”

He tried to scream, but her
body was a sheet of white flame

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

113

and her eyes were two black suns ;
he stared like a wild thing
trapped.

She did not move, and he could
not.

The ivory furniture of fascina-
tion, her shoulders, and the two
blue-lined moons, her breasts,
floated on that river of ballads,
her tiger hair, inside his head;
then everything twisted in icy
waves of paralysis about the tree
of his spine, until it became a
frozen sapling.

“Halfy!" he choked, before it
seized him completely.

MINUS FOUR

I S he going to live?” asked the
fat sergeant.

“Don’t know yet,” answered
the tall one, wiping egg from his
mustache. “As soon as they give
him new blood it becomes tainted.
They can’t transfuse fast enough
to dilute it. Lungs are paralyzed.
They’ve got a squeeze-box on his
chest, and he’s doped up plenty.”
“Who takes over if he dies?”
“The kid, they say.”

“God !”

He looked at the figure on the
cot. The man blinked up at the
ceiling and did not move. Four
of Comstock’s Commandos sat at
the points of the compass with
weapons pointed in his direction.
“What about him?”

“We’re going to question him
as soon as he comes to his sens-
es."

“He’s the tiger?” he asked.

“That’s what they say.”

“He’d know about Stat then.”

“That’s right.”

The fat man’s high-pitched
voice shook. His small, dark eyes
gleamed.

“Let me question him!”

“Everybody wants to. What’s
so special about you?” '

“He tried to kill the Duke. I
have the same dibs as anyone
else.”

The other shook his head.

“We’re going to draw straws
for the first session. You’ll have
the same chance as the rest of
us.”

“Good.” The fat man hitched
up his belt. “I want a tiger’s
tooth bracelet.”

« « «

"DICHARD lay encased in the
coffin of coils, tubes, dia-
phragms, and bottles. It breathed
for him. It did the work of a
hundred pairs of kidneys. It
charged his blood with vitamins
and antiserums. It prodded his
reticulo-endothelial system into
storms of protest.

He thought for himself, how-
ever, during the strange periods
of calm through which his mind
drifted. It was as if he were free
of his burning flesh and floating
bodiless in empty space. . . .

Youth’s the season made for
joy. Love is then a duty . . .

Snatches of old songs pursued
him. He felt peacefully impotent

114

FANTASTIC

for the first time since his child-
hood.

A flash of remorse illuminated
his inner night as he thought of
the Federation — the slow-turn-
ing, in-gathering, chewing, di-
gesting Federation. The Turner-
ian Axis was the last great op-
position to its octopal embrace.
Vanishing, like memories of his
youth, the autonomy with which
the frontier worlds had once been
endowed, into the maw of the oc-
topus — its movements seeking to
emulate the wheel and spin of the
galaxy — to become cells of the
beast.

No ! He would not let it happen.
He would live ! All nine starships
had arrived and were waiting,
somewhere above, in a V-forma-
tion. Nine starships waiting for
his hand to guide their spear in-
to the eye of the octopus, and
down through its heart, Stat ! He
tried as hard as he could to live.

The feelings of fire returned.

“You can’t hold me forever,
halfy!” he gasped. “You’re losing
your grip already!”

“That’s right,” she smiled.

“Someone will come to tell me
what that commotion was — they
will find you here. . . .”

“No,” she said.

“. . . Then you’re going to
wish you had never been born.”

“I’ve been doing that for nine-
teen years,” she answered, before
breaking a vase on his head.

NIN? STARSHIPS WAITING

Old father, old artificer, what
has happened?

I’ve failed.

Vindici does not fail.

Who is Vindici?

Youmust try to remember . . .
* * *

“I win!” giggled the fat man.

Tiger, tiger . . .

“I win,” he repeated.

Burning bright . . .

“I’ll use that room,” he pointed.

I’m coming.

“Go ahead.”

• Get out of the palace.

He arose, and the guards
dragged Ramsay to his feet.

Do you remember?

They pushed him in the direc-
tion of the storage room.

I’m trying. Get out of the pal-
ace!

He staggered forward and
lurched against the wall.

Why?

The door swung open. Many
hands pushed him, and he was
inside the room.

I don’t know. But I know that
you must leave now.

He stayed on his feet, with ef-
fort. He stood in the center of the
room, squinting puffy eyelids to
shield his yellow-gray stare from
the naked bulb overhead.

There are nine starships in the
sky. . . .

Go home!

The sergeant smiled and closed
the door behind him. He locked
it, placed the key in his pocket.

115

“So you’re the tiger. You don’t
look so fierce.’’

Ramsay shook his head and
glared.

The sergeant removed the gun
from his belt and slipped it be-
hind his waistband. Slowly, luxu-
riating in each movement, he un-
clasped his wide leather belt and
drew it from around his waist.
He began wrapping it about his
right hand.

Tiger, tiger , . .

When only the buckle and two
inches of leather extended from
his fist he smiled and took a slow
step forward.

Burning bright . . .

Ramsay reached over his head
and broke the lightbulb.

“Better yet, Vindici,” came
the chuckle.

The fat man took three steps
through the blackness, toward
the place where Ramsay stood.

In the forest of the night . . .

He raised his right hand to
strike.

Whut immortal hand or eye
dare frame . . .

The second last sound that he
heard was a metallic click from
behind his back. Something
seized a handful of his hair and
a knee jammed into his spine.

He felt something, like a piece
of ice, touch his throat, and he
was suddenly very wet.

The last sound that he heard
was either a gurgle or a. soft
laugh or both.

C omstock sprang to his feet,
face whitening.

“Escaped?”

“Yes sir,” writhed tha^lieuten-
ant.

“Who is responsible?"
“Sergeant Alton.” The lieuten-
ant was chewing his lower lip.
“Have him shot immediately.”
“He’s already dead, sir. Vindi-
ci cut his throat and took his
gun. He killed five guards. There
was an open window and one
missing uniform.”

“Find him. Bring him here if
you can. If you can’t, then bring
me what’s left.”

“Yes, sir. We’re searching
now.”

“Get out of here! Help find
him!”

“Yessir.”

A memory nagged him for a
long moment. Then he seated
himself and raised the comm lev-
er.

“Sir?”

“Double Richard’s guard. That
man is loose again.”

He dropped the lever without
waiting for a reply.

“He was right,” he told the
empty screen. “He was really
right.”

* * *

The world of Stat’s a drunk-
en bat.

It woggles to and fro . . .

» * *

“He’s failed,” Harrison told
the shiny brown box.

116

FANTASTIC

“Is he still alive?” it asked.

“Yes, bu^-”

“Then he hadn’t failed,” it an-
swered.

“But he’ll be dead soon. . . .”

There was a sound like the
breaking .of strings on a steel
guitar.

Harrison realized then that he
was talking to himself.

He closed the box, his mouth,
and his mind, and went to join
the tiger hunt.

* * «

— Father . . .

— Who is that?

— Cassy, but . .

— I know no one named Cassy.
I am no one’s father.

— You are Vindici. You are al-
so Captain Ramsay. J am your
daughter.

— I borrow Ramsay occasional-
ly. You are his daughter, not
mine.

— Very well, have it your way.
But look above you.

— I am underground. There is
nothing to see.

— There are nine starships in
the sky, waiting to strike at the
Federation.

— They won’t get that far.

— Perhaps I want them to.

—Why?

— We both have reason to kill
Richard. But the Federation . . .
Perhaps there is reason to break
it also.

— What reason?

— It has already served its pur-

pose. It’s gotten man to the stars.
Now it is a huge sponge, sopping
the blood of worlds that cry for
independence. Squeeze it, and it
will shrink', bleeding. . . .

— That’s not my job.

— Once it was my father’s.
Long ago.

— And Richard killed him! Are
you suggesting that Richard’s
plan be permitted to proceed, un-
altered?

— Only you know where Stat is
located. . . .

— That’s right.

— Do you remember Gloria ?

Silence.

— Men ahead! Lights!

Flight, wordless.

Hate, an active verb.

Fury, the inside of a furnace.

Pain —

Silence. . . .

MINUS THREE

E was awake.

For a long while he did not
open his eyes. He thought of his
arms and his legs and they were
there. He tried to decide what he
was, but he could not remember.

He began to shiver.

Then the pain came.

He had been running, running
through passages under the
ground. He stirred the bonfire of
memory. He had been working his
way beneath the palace. He was
nearing the huge vents. Someone
had been talking to him, from
somewhere.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

117

The bonfire smouldered.

Someone, probably Ramsay,
had wanted him to smash Stat.
He remembered killing many
men. He remembered being
backed against the wall, his gun
snatched away. He remembered
being beaten.

He was on all fours, snarling.
They were kicking him. He re-
membered gripping an ankle and
hammering below a kneecap as a
man bent above him. He recalled
the snap and the scream. Then
there was blood in his mouth and
a skull in his head, splitting, and
a mirror behind his eyelids, but
no reflection . , .

He licked his lips and gagged
at the taste of blood. He forced his
swollen eyes open.

“For nineteen years you have
marked magnificent time,” said
the voice inside his head. “In the
entire sidereal abattoir there had
never been another such as Vin-
dici for the breaking of places,
the killing of people, and the
stopping of things — but you have
failed in the only job that really
meant anything to a man you
once were — ” His memory licked,
like the tape recordings which
had filled nearly half the life of
his mind, changing channels.

“You are a naked, useless man,
a pitiful, crawling worm, a fork
of stripped willow, a poor player,
strutting and fretting — you sig-
nify nothing ! — only deeds re-
deem, and you cannot do them!

You are afraid to look in a mir-
ror and view the countenance of
cowardice . . ,

He snarled.

He threw his head back and
bellowed through broken teeth.
The pain in his wide-stretched
limbs was enormous. His cry beat
upon the bars and his cracked
ribs and was broken in mid-howl.
He sobbed within his cage.

His wrists and ankles were
clamped tight against the frame
of the great rack. There was
shade below, but the hot light of
the sun drove needles through
his eyeballs.

He looked about, slowly.

He was alone, at the bottom of
a pit, with his rack. An ugly dejd
vu occurred as a coffin swam
through his mind, drifting in a
lake of blood.

The walls were stone, and at
least twenty feet high. Thejf were
unbroken by any openings. The
enclosure was about ten feet
square. His rack was tilted back
at a ninety-degree angle. The
mouth of the pit was open.

It was too high, too smooth to
climb, even if he could manage
to break his metal bonds.

The sun was a green one-spot
on a pale blue die, slightly right
of center. Nothing intruded upon
his view of the heavens, not even
a cloud.

He cursed the sun, he cursed
the day. He cursed the gods
shooting craps above him.

118

FANTASTIC

T he sun moved directly to the
center of its square, then be-
gan an amoeba-like crawling to
the left. Finally, it kissed the rim
of the pit. He expected it to dis-
solve and flow down the wall,
raining green fire upon him. In-
stead, it was sliced shorter and
shorter and finally was gone. The
square became an empty aquari-
um.

Voices.

"There he is,” said the woman.
“Is he still alive?”

He tilted his head and looked
up, hating.

“Lord ! Look at those muscles !
Those eyes — !”

“He’s a halfy,” said her com-
panion, a thin youth with a ban-
dage about his head. “I’m going
to come back every hour. I’m go-
ing to watch him die. But he still
has a lot of life left — halfies are
strong.”

The woman waved at him,
jauntily.

“Halfy!” cried the boy. “You
failed. My father is getting bet-
ter and he’s going to live! He’ll
personally open your veins as
soon as he’s able to move!”

Vindici’s eyes burned and the
boy reeled. He began to fall for-
ward. The woman grabbed his
arm and jerked him back.

“It didn’t work,” he called
down. “Nice try, though. Your
daughter is better at that sort of
thing ! I hope you’re around to see
what I’m going to do with her.”

“The ingredients of tiger soup
are hard to come by . . .”
groaned the man on the rack.

There was laughter above.

“But we’ve caught the tiger!”

The square grew empty once
more, and the sounds trailed off
in the distance.

Daughter. They had said
“daughter”, hadn’t they?
Ramsay’s daughter. Cassy . . .

— Cassy. Where are you?

— Hiding. In the apartment
building. There is a room — dark,
cool. It was not in the blueprints.

— They are looking for you
now. Do not leave the place.

— Where are you?

—It is not important.

— 7 see a piece of sky. A win-
dow?

He closed his eyes.

— No.

— You are hurting. But I
thought you ivere dead.

— Don’t worry about me. Stay
safe. Leave this world when
things grow still once more.

— Where is there to go?

— Offioorld, anywhere.

— The Federation will be ev-
erywhere. I am of Turner’s
world, not of man’s. So are you.

— No! I am Vindici! I was not
born!

Silence.

— Why are you weeping, girl?

— How could you tell? I was
weeping' for my father.

— Ramsay is dead. He was
weak.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

119

— No. You are Ramsay. Vindi-
ci is facade and falsehood.

— Go away!

Silence,

■ » »

IGHT. Clouds.

Stars, and the sounds of

birds.

In the El Greco sky, framed
by lips of the pit, nine stars were
arrow awaiting target. . . .

A head interrupted the sky.

. . . Bandaged head, white.
Halo of steel, crown. . . . Mock
of steel, laughter. . . .

"We know where she is, Vin-
dici ! I’ll have her here and let you
watch — soon !”

Emptied crown. Clouds. Seas
of cotton.

— Run! Run! They know where
you are!

— How could they?

— 7 do notknoio.

Flight before fury.

Harrison hurried through the
night, a puzzled look on his tired
face, a gun in his pocket, and
Stat’s latest pronouncement
rolling about his head like a mar-
ble in a tin can.

* * »

Youth’s the season made for
joy—

Richard perspired as the nine
metal-blue eyes peered pyramid
through his skylight.

He tried to raise an arm, but
both were clamped to the bed.

"The world of Stat’s a drunk-
en bat . . ,’’

Smythe poured another drink.

". . . Only Statcom knows,”
he hiccupped.

MINUS TWO

"Y^OU’RE a fool, Vindici! Take
A a good look!” He pushed
her forward.

Cassy?

— Yes. They were waiting,

“You flushed your cub for us !
Tomorrow morning my father
will be able to sit up 1 He’s going
to kill you then! But tonight is
mine — and hers!”

I’m sorry, Cassy.

— You didn’t know. They
tricked you.

“I knew you halfles could talk,
mind to mind! You made her
run! — Into my arms!”

Vindici roared. It was not a
human sound that emerged from
his stiffened throat. The hackles
rose on the back of his neck.

His eyes became distinguisha-
ble to those above him. Two
burning points. . . .

She tilted her head, straining
against her captors grip.

I love you.

As she moved, her net of tiger
gold snared the formation of
mine, and drew it, wreath, to her
brow.

There was a snapping sound
and Vindici’s left hand came free.
The pain in his right wrist in-
creased to unbearable propor-

120

FANTASTIC

tions. His voice rose and fell
through a terrible series of wails
and cries.

Laughter above, and an empty
canvas . . .

Words from everywhere
seemed to be saying, "Come back !
I hate you !” to everyone in the
palace and on the grounds.

Richard moaned within his pri-
son of pipettes.

Vindici looked up at the nine
starships, then dropped his head.

“One time were you peerless,"
said the tape-worn synapses.
“Once the arm of Tamburlaine
was invincible, and the dagger of
Vindici never missed its mark.
Under all the passes of Time's
wand only one remained — you,
Vindici ! — of the ancient dynasty
of bloodletters. Mad in Argos,
you slew your mother, tongueless
in Castile, you stabbed Lorenzo
— you, the lance of the black
Quixote, dagger of the damned,
cup of hemlock, dart of Loki —
the bough where the murderer
hangs. . . .”

"I still am,” he muttered.

“No, you are a man on a rack,
a broken blade, a gob of flesh and
phlegm. . . .”

“Yes ! You are a snapped firing-
pin, an unvoiced battle-cry — you
are the want of a horseshoe for
which a kingdom was lost. . . .”

A mirror appeared before his
eyes.

“No!” he cried. “No! I am
Vindici ! The son of Death ! Bred

in the Senecan twilight of Jaco-
bean demigods, and punctual as
death!”

He looked into the mirror.
“Behold !” he laughed. “Behold
I am the fury!”

Vindici, the tiger, sprang.

* » *•

All went black as the world
came to an end.

« *

Dribble.

Dribble. . . .

Rain. Soft on lips of sand.

A moan.

. . . Dribble.

* * *

“Water,” he asked. “Water.”
“Here.”

“More.”

“Here.”

“Good. More.”

“Slowly. Please.”

Green met green in circles of
seeing.

“Here?” she asked.

“Here,” he nodded.

“Father.”

“Gassy.”

He looked at the world.

“What happened ?”

“Gone. Dead. Rest now. Talk
later.”

“Richard?”

“Dead.”

“Larry?”

“Dead.”

“The ships?”

“Only Vindici knows.”

He slept.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

121

Nine starships waiting. Hurry,
hurry, hurry. . . .

MINUS ONE

I T is morning,” she said, “and
no birds are singing — all of
them dead, and fallen from the
trees.”

“Vindici always hated the
birds,” he told her. “Where are
the soldiers ? The courtiers ?”

“All of them dead.”

He propped himself on ^n el-
bow.

" ‘Paraphysical conversion
from a psychopath neurosis,’ ” he
repeated, “ ‘produced when the
stimuli overwhelm available phys-
ical responses.’— Channing’s
words never meant anything to
Vindici, but I remember them.”

“And the battle conches? Nine
starships ?”

He snapped his fingers and
winced at the pain in his wrist.

“Gone. Dust — dust of dust. He
blacked them.”

He dropped back to the grass.
“Everyone,” he said.

“Every living thing in the pal-
ace and on the grounds,” she
agreed, “except for me.”

“ — Even himself.”

Ramsay looked at the sky.
“How classic and dreadful.
What a man he was!”

“Man? Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not. I couldn’t do it.”
Harrison entered the open
gates and moved through the or-
chard.

He approached the couple on
the lawn.

“Good morning.”

“Quiet here.”

"Yea.”

He looked about.

“How did you get him up?”

“The same winch they used to
lower him. I put it back in the
shed.” She pointed.

“Neat, aren’t you?”

She gave her father another
drink.

Harrison jammed his hands
into his pockets and paced out a
square.

“What did you do with the
ships?”

She shrugged.

“He says Vindici ‘blocked’
them.”

He stared at the man on the
ground.

“Vindici . . .”

“Ramsay,” corrected the split
lips.

“That makes it harder.”

He removed the gun from his
pocket.

“I’m sorry, honestly. But it has
to be done.”

“ ‘The bird-killer weeps,’ said
the sparrow. — ‘Watch his hands,
not his eyes,’ answered the crow.”

“Stat says Vindici must die.”

“He is dead,” she told him.

He shook his head.

“So long as he breathes, the
tiger lives — and he might appear
again someday.”

122

FANTASTIC

“No,” “No,” said Ramsay.
“I’m sorry.”

He raised the gun. He aimed
for a long, long while.

Slowly, he toppled forward on-
to his face.

Cassiopeia smiled.

“Family heritage.”

She picked up his gun and
tossed it into the pit.

“He'll have a sore nose this
afternoon.”

She helped her father to his
feet, and together they staggered
toward the unguarded vehicle
pens.

» * »

H arrison was right,” he told
her, “he’s not dead.”

He drew the smoke deep into
his lungs and exhaled heavily.
“What do you mean?”

“I’m both now. We’ve fused. I
know what he knew.”
“Everything?”

“Including the hate,” he said.
“What’s there left to hate?”
she asked, almost eagerly.
“Stat.”

“What good does hating Stat
do you? Stat’s like Time — it just
goes on and on.”

He shook his head.

“There is a difference. Stat
must come to an end.”

“How’s it to be done?”

He stared into the small mir-
ror by the bedstead.

“I can’t black it, like he did
the ships. That calls for a special
kind of hate, and I can’t muster

it. But there’s enough of the ti-
ger left in me for another hunt.”

He closed his eyes.

“I do know how to get to Stat.
Harrison is alive. When he re-
ports failure it will only be a
matter of time before Stat finds
another way. I’ll die then.”

"If Stat could be destroyed
. . her voice trailed off. “If
only Stat could be destroyed! It
used you, me, everyone !”

She looked back at him.

“Nine battle conches couldn’t
break the Federation.”

“Not with Stat and Vindici on
their side,” he answered, “But
if the tiger decapitates the ro-
bot and disappears, then the out-
worlds might declare their inde-
pendence and have a chance of
maintaining it.”

“What will you need ?”

“Nothing. All the tools of my
trade are cached in the hills.”

“You can’t leave in your con-
dition.”

“I’ll be in shape by the time I
get there — shape enough. It’s a
long walk home from heaven,
even with h.d.”

She mixed him a drink and
watched him drink it.

That afternoon, upon a hilltop,
she purred softly as he leapt in-
to the sky screaming fire, to hunt
the drunken bat.

* * «

T hirty minutes before Stat
came to an end the ship’s ra-
dio blared.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

123

“Identify ! Identify ! These
lanes are off-limits to- civilian
traffic! Identify!”

Smythe watched through a
beacon-eye that peered from an
island of rock. He pressed a but-
ton.

"Bring Channing — fast!”

Spaghettis of paper coiled
about his ankles. He raised a
strand, then dropped it.

He switched off the automatic
warnings and picked up a micro-
phone.

“The ship has beefl identified,
Vindici. It’s ours, you know.”

He lifted the toggle and waited.

No reply.

He spoke again.

“Statcom predicted that if you
survived you would try to return.
Stat cannot be destroyed.”

The door sighed open and
Channing stood blinking at him,
flanked by two maintenance ro-
bots.

“Come in, quickly!”

He entered the control room,
eyes mild, face placid.

Smythe slapped him.

“Channing. Doctor Karol
Channing,” he said. “I am Carl
Smythe. You are a psychiatric
engineer in the Corps d’ Assas-
sins. You created a super killer
named Vindici. You have been
under sedation recently, but you
remember Vindici, don’t you ?

“Yes,” said Channing, “I re-
member Vindici. I remember
Smythe, and Channing.”

“Good." He handed him the
microphone. “It was your voice
that conditioned Vindici. Take
this and talk to him. He is out-
side. Tell him to answer you.”

Channing gripped the micro-
phone clumsily.

“Vindici?” he asked it. “Vin-
dici, this is Doctor Channing. If
you can hear me, answer me.”

Smythe pushed up on the lever.

The talk box talked.

“Hi, Doc. Sorry I have to kill
you and a lot of other people, just
to knock off Stat, but that’s how
the story goes. You know, Fran-
kenstein, et cetera.”

Smythe snatched the micro-
phone.

"Vindici, listen. We can still
use you. Land. I’ll open a hatch.
You’ll need more conditioning,
but you can still be of use to
Stat.”

“Sorry,” came the reply, “this
isn’t Vindici, it’s Captain Ram-
say of Turner’s Guard. Twenty
years ago I declared war on the
Federation. I just remembered
that recently. You were a kid
then — I don’t know what you
are now, Smythe. . . .”

“That’s your last word on the
matter?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Then we’re going to destroy
you,” he said, switching on a
panel of lights. “I really hate to
lose a good man.”

“Go ahead and try losing me,”
said Ramsay. “I was raised from

124

FANTASTIC

the dead to do this job. Tell that
old washing machine you have to
do its worst.”

S MYTHE pushed the button
numbered 776.

He glanced at the screen.

The hovering ship, bearing the
number 776 on its side, glowed
red and became a Roman Candle.

Smythe switched off the re-
ceiver.

"All the ships bear the seeds of
their own destruction,” he ob-
served.

"Doesn’t everything?” asked
Channing.

Smythe mopped his forehead
and looked at the thermostat.

"Hot in here.”

“Very.”

“We’re shielded. That explosion
shouldn’t be doing this.”

“It’s getting hotter.”

Bells began to ring.

Statcom spoke, in tongues of
paper.

“Something else is out there !”
cried Smythe.

Channing leaned forward and
turned on the broadcast-receive
unit.

“Ramsay?” he asked.

“I read you, loud and clear.”
Smythe began throwing
switches. Another scene ap-
peared on the viewer. The surface
of Stat was hot. A figure in a
spacesuit moved about it, drop-
ping parcels into the hatchway
pocks.

NINE STARSHIPS WAITING

“Congratulations,” said Chan-
ning, “you have exceeded my ex-
pectations.”

The redhead snatched the mi-
crophone.

“What are you 'doing out
there?”

“You didn’t think I’d stick
with the ship when it got this
close, did you? I hooked up my
suit-radio to broadcast through
it while I came on ahead. Stat is
beginning to die.”

“Not yet,” said Smythe.

He inserted a key beneath a
lever and turned it. He jerked
down on the lever as Channing
struck him.

Lying on his back, he watched
Channing stare at the blazing
surface of Stat.

— My Perseus! cried Medusa,
and smouldering in stone!

Then the fires began to subside.
"Inner line of defense,” he
laughed. “Thermite fuses.”

"The tiger,” Channing whis-
pered, “is burning bright.”

T hirty seconds before Stat
came to an end Cassiopeia
began to weep, uncontrollably.
She tore off her dress and
smashed all the mirrors in her
apartment.

With hair of tiger gold and
eyes of tiger black, she stood
upon the balcony, staring across
the wide, dark room of the sky,
her fearful symmetries of hate.
THE END

125

According to you...

Dear Editor ;

The covers for both the No-
vember and December issues
of FANTiSTic were good (though
I still dislike Birmingham’s liney
quality) but the Lee Brown Coye
drawings added real quality of
eeriness to the back cover.

December, it seems to me, was
representative of the finest ef-
fort exerted in quite a while.
The most all-around perfect is-
sue I’ve read, every story was
top-rate. Especially enjoyed the
Sharkey serial and Laumer’s
plausibly written "Cocoon”
seems to be a further testimony
of his talent. Leinster’s “Imbal-
ance” was entertaining. Each
one of these was top-rate and it
was quite surprising to find
them altogether in one issue.
The only disappointment seemed
to be “Heritage.” From SaM’s
introduction, I expected some-
thing unusually good and
though it was worth reading it

certainly was not worthy of the
label “classic” which is so loose-
ly tossed around nowadays. “Ti-
tan,” is a good example of a
“Fantasy Classic” but certainly
■ “Heritage” was below par.

“It’s Magic You Dope” was as
entertaining as it was effectively
written. This story, by employ-
ing the myths of yesteryear,
presented a flavor reminiscent
of “The Wizard Of Oz” . . . the
three characters traveling to a
castle to rescue an unfortunate
victim, combatting the numer-
ous obstacles along the way. A
whopping success.

In summing up. I’d say that
the December is the finest all
around issue to appear in a long
time.

Dave Keil

38 Slocum Crescent

Forest Hills 75, N.Y.

• More Sharkey is coming
up, both in fantastic and in
our sister magazine, amazing.

126

Dear Miss Goldsmith :

, Much as I dislike Birming-
ham's cover art style, I’ll will-
ingly put up with it as long as it
inspires Jack Sharkey to such
masterpieces as “Robotum De-
lenda Est,” and the current “It’s
Magic, You Dope!’’ That old
UNKNOWN kind of story in-
deed! One of the most delight-
fully wacky pieces I’ve read in
I don’t know how long. Keep
printing stories like these and
you won’t have to worry about
losing readers if you go to 60^.

I have a complaint about your
use of Lee Brown Coye’s art-
work. You didn’t use nearly
enough of it! A whole issue of
Coye artwork wouldn’t be too
much. I certainly hope you’re
going to make him a steady
member of your stable of artists
as soon as possible. You deserve
another award for reintroducing
him to the prozines.

Fred Patten
5156 Chesley Ave.

Los Angeles 43, Calif.

• Many more Coye Ulos com-
ing up — including a cover.

Dear Editor:

Yay Sharkey! “It’s Magic,
You Dope’’ was really great.
He certainly has come a long
way since his last novel, “The
Crispin Affair.’^ In fact, the
whole issue was exceptional what
with Laumer and Leinster ap-
pearing, too.

Adragna isn’t too bad, let’s see
some more by him. Coye’s style
is interesting and good for real
fantasy illustrations.

I especially liked Leinster’s
story because it shows a side of
his talents which I had hereto-
fore not encountered. I think you
should try to prod a couple more
humorous stories from him.
While you’re prodding, get him
to write another Calhoun novel.
That reminds me, have we seen
the last of that saint of the
spaceways. Sir Dominic Flan-
dry? Please, say it isn’t so!
Arnold Katz
98 Patton Blvd.

New Hyde Park, N.Y.

• Flandry is reportedly on a
long trip across the Coal Sack.
Perhaps there’s a story in it —
if he manages to get hack home.

Dear Editor :

As an old friend of the late
Howard Phillips Lovecroft, I am
always on the lookout for more
weird, uncanny yarns and maca-
bre illustrations, and this De-
cember, 1962, issue of fantastic
surely pleased me! It was tops!

I enjoyed “Heritage” very
much, especially the “different”
illustrations by Lee Brown Coye ;
E J. Derringer wrote a truly
fantastic yarn, and Coye certain-
ly illustrated it beautifully! The
back cover was wonderful, and
the weird picture illustrating the
story brought chills ! Give us

127

more Illustrations by this talent-
ed artist! How our late friend,
H. P. Lovecraft, would have liked
his weird illustrations for his own
weird concoctions!

All of December’s tales were
interesting, but “Heritage”
was best! I love your magazine!

Mrs. Clifford M. Eddy
688 Prairie Avenue
Providence 6, R.I.

• We love you, too.

Dear Editor:

Well, I certainly was pleased
with your December cover for
FANTASTIC. It’s been ages since
I’ve seen that beautifully gaudy
red-and-yellow type of sky. Who-
ever this Robert Adragna is he
sure can handle himself with
paints. And surely there’ll be
more of him? You can’t possibly
let such a fantastic fantasy talent
slip through your fingers.

As for a description of that
cover, for once I am practically
speechless. Words like resplend-
ent, magnificent, gorgeous, fan-
tastic come to my mind but they
are not nearly suitable. My very
first glance overwhelmed me and
I have not recovered since. It is
easily, definitely your best cover
for the entire year.

. . . one more word about the

art of the issue: I hope the two
pictures illustrating that fantasy
“classic” Heritage are not any
example or true sample of what
Lee Brown Coye is capable of
doing. I’ve never seen such gar-
ish, ridiculous things in all my
life as a fan. I practically died
laughing at those vampirish teeth
and those white circles with spots
that Coye denotes as eyes.

The Sharkey serial was good,
but just a little too fantastic for
my tastes. But that’s no reflec-
tion on my attitude toward seri-
als. The more serials the better.
I feel you’ve just not had enough.

Elasily the best story in the
issue was Keith Laumer’s “Co-
coon.” It was really a story worth
remembering. The smooth-flow-
ing style of the author was in the
best of science fiction’s modern
traditions. And the point of the
story — ambition — was — well
made, not didactic but beautifully
stressed and nearly perfectly ex-
pressed. It was a great story.

Bob Adolfsen
9 Prospect Ave.
Sea Cliff, N.Y.

• “A little too fantastic, the
mcm says. That’s a complaint we
haven’t heard in years. Anyone
else think fantasy can he too fan
out?

128

FANTASTIC

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129

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JEEPS $278, airplanes $159, boats $7.B8, gen-
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GOVERNMENT Surplus Direct From Govern-
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Thousands More. Amazing Low Prices. How,
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HYPNOTISM

HYPNOTIZE Unnoticed, quickly, effortlessly,
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FUTURE system of Mathematics— Guaran-
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130

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“There was a roar from the edge of the
clearing, and a huge wildfaced man in
a straw hat, a shot gun held like a crotc-
bar in his massive hands, stormed in
among the Indians, driving them hack.

see A QUESTION OF RE-ENTRY

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